Latest in Royal Television Society Conference

Happy Friday International Insiders. Tom Grater here coming to you live from the San Sebastian Film Festival with the week's top international news. To get this sent to your inbox every Friday, sign up here. A Royal Affair On the block: One subject above all others dominated this week's Royal Television Society…

Tim Davie, the BBC's Director-General, has said the broadcaster needs "a really serious dialogue with government" in the context of Nadine Dorries replacing Oliver Dowden as the UK's new Culture Secretary. Dorries has been an outspoken critic of the BBC in the past. In 2018 she tweeted that the broadcaster was "a…

Alex Mahon, the chief executive of British broadcaster Channel 4, says there's "no evidence" that privatization of the of the public broadcaster would benefit the channel and that, rather, it would mean a lot of the PSB's current programming would become commercially unsustainable, impacting its ability to break new…

Former Disney and TikTok executive Kevin Mayer invited the audience at today's RTS Convention in the UK to pitch names for his new, still untitled media company, which is backed by investment firm Blackstone. He might want to come up with one soon, as the outfit's high-profile acquisition drive, which has seen it…

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton’s HiddenLight Productions have optioned film and TV rights to Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series. Hillary, who has made no secret of her love of the mystery series throughout the years, featuring them on many of her reading lists, told attendees at the Royal Television…

ITV chief Carolyn McCall has expressed her disappointment at losing out on broadcasting Emma Raducanu's historic U.S. Open triumph, revealing her company was outbid by rival Channel 4 for the rights to show the Amazon Prime Video program on free-to-air. McCall, who is an ardent tennis fan, admitted that ITV was in the…

Adam Crozier, CEO of UK broadcaster ITV, has suggested making viewers pay for extra content, such as alternative endings. At one point he talked about charging Brit TV viewers to watch hugely popular soap Coronation Street first online, but rowed back from that. Crozier was speaking at the Royal Television Society…

Time Warner's chairman and CEO says he asks what TV aggregators can do for his channels rather than the other way round. "New entrants such as Google , Amazon and Apple must support or improve programming going into the marketplace," said Bewkes, speaking at the Royal Television Society conference in London this…

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt raised the possibility of Sky also being told to run local news, at least in the short term. Otherwise it could risk being demoted on where it sits on electronic TV listings. Hunt thinks that Sky and other broadcasters will end up paying local TV news suppliers because local news will…

Local TV channels don't exist here the way they do in the States. If anything, TV has been going in reverse, with the regional ITV Network having bigger and bigger footprints. UK culture secretary Jeremy Hunt will confirm Tuesday morning that he's abolishing local cross-media ownership restrictions. Hunt will…