As well as recent cost savings, ITV plc is now benefiting from the combined ad income from the merged English and Welsh ITV franchises, enabling it to spend more money on programming. But whether it will spend that money wisely is another issue altogether and will be the ultimate test of whether a single merged ITV company was a good idea in the first place, given the initial promises made.
Unfortunately for Granada there are still key problems that need to be addressed one year after the Granada/Carlton merger, and I fear that the current management may not have the foresight or the will to properly solve them. For one thing ITV is still too dependent on soaps/reality TV and recycled drama, and has only been saved from oblivion by the loyality of its chosen core audience.
If ITV wishes to recapture some of its lost audience then it should experiment more with new ideas, and ITV2/ITV3 should present the perfect opportunity to do so without threatening ITV1's audience figures. But that will require significant amounts of money to be spent on programmes with potentially lower audience figures, and ITV's recent track record has been less than promising in this regard.
The original ITV network and established franchise system - celebrating its 50th anniversary this coming Autumn - probably needed to evolve at some point in time, but the relative success of UTV in Northern Ireland shows that smaller franchises can still make money if nothing else. One big ITV company might have its advantages of scale but the regional franchise system has unique benefits which may be impossible to replicate.
