Media Guardian: US rebels call for ITV to be broken up

Calls from investors to break up companies to "release value" happen all the time in the world of the public limited company. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes one of the new companies goes off and recreates the division it's just offloaded (BT being a prime example - it sold off Yellow Pages, then started doing Yellow Page-esque listings in it's telephone directory, and it sold off BT Cellnet - now O2 - and started looking at how it could do mobile...)

The latter scenario seems quite plausible for a demerged broadcast-only ITV. It's digital channels ITV3 and ITV4 rely a lot on the old LWT, Granada and Yorkshire back catalogue in order to get ratings. But where would new programmes come from in the future? Suddenly things begin to look expensive...

There's little doubt that a demerged ITV production arm would do well as a standalone company - there's many big names in the production world who don't have their own channel - Talkback Thames, Endemol etc - but even so, there might be the temptation to set up their own channel, taking their key productions with them.

Other questions would also remain unanswered. What would happen to the various ITV regional centres? Do regional news and regional programming get split, or do they stay together?

And more importantly, what happens to the name? Well obviously ITV Broadcast would keep the ITV name, but what do you call the production arm? Granada perhaps? But then that's the name of a certain ITV broadcast franchise.

Still, if a demerger ever did happen, one group would certainly benefit from the attempts to release value. The consultants who'd get a nice pay cheque as they attempt to sort out the resulting mess.