Ultimajock said:
independent adjective
Definition
• not influenced or controlled in any way by other people, events or things
Source: Cambridge English Dictionary
...thus, claiming "not part of the BBC" as qualifying ITV to be made up of "independent" stations is as silly as claiming CBS affiliates are "independent" because they're not NBC or ABC affiliates. If it is part of a network, it is not independent. Period, paragraph, end of bloody story.
Your assertion doesn't hold water for for ITV, apparently, since the I in ITV *stands* for Independent.
I think that anyone familiar with the history of broadcasting in England would dispute your statement, at least up until the recent time where most of the owners of the ITV franchises merged. Back then, there was no organizational chart that had an ITV "CEO". *Now*, ITV plc is a network (mostly - some regions, like Scotland and Northern Ireland, are still independent of the merged company that now calls itself ITV plc) but back then ITV was an umbrella term for the regional companies and their production arms. Money changed hands between them when programming passed from one to the other. Not intercorporate funny-money; actual cash. There's an account of the sorts of things Lew Grade (CEO of ATV, the ITV franchisee for London's weekends and the Midlands' weekdays from 1955-1968) would pull to try and get more of that money to flow in his direction here:
http://www.transdiffusion.org/emc/tvheroes/howardthomas/howard7.php
By the way, there's a lot of other interesting history at transdiffusion.org. You should read it.
Since we're looking things up, let's look at the Wikiepdia entry for ITV:
"ITV is a public service network of British commercial television broadcasters, set up under the Independent Television Authority (ITA) to provide competition to the BBC."
It was, at the time, a mandate that each of the regions be run as separate businesses, independent from each other, independent from the BBC, and pretty much from anything else, mostly because the UK looked at commercial television in the US and decided they didn't want it to work that way. The individual regional franchisees paid into each other's produced programming based on their share of the expected viewership. It's like KNBC in Los Angeles being owned by a different company than WNBC in New York, and asking WNBC to cough up 10% of the cost of producing The Tonight Show in cash based on the fact that 10% of the show's audience watched over WNBC. (In this scenario, rather than the NBC Peacock, you'd see a logo for KNBC Los Angeles at the beginning of the show.)
ITV was not a network in the sense that we regard ABC, CBS and NBC as one; the relationship between each of the regional franchise owners was as buyers and sellers of content, and the only organizational connection each of the regional broadcasters had with each other was through the ITA, which was an authority created for the purpose of (again, quoting Wikipedia) "determining the location, constructing, building, and operating the transmission stations used by the ITV network, as well as determining the franchise areas and awarding the franchises for each regional commercial broadcaster." In other words, the UK created in the ITA a sort of ITV-focused FCC for the purpose of handling commercial television.
Some things they did were very different indeed. For instance, London was thought too important a region to hand to one broadcaster, so they split it into a weekday franchise and a weekend franchise, and had separate companies run each. Imagine watching a station on a Friday afternoon, noticing a curious absence of promos for the weekend's shows (or even that evening's) and when 5:15pm rolled around, seeing them say farewell and actually end their broadcast day - at which point your screen would twitch as a technician at the transmitter unplugged their feed and plugged in the feed for the weekend franchisee, who then welcomed you to *their* broadcast day and began promoting the weekend's offerings. That's what happened every Friday afternoon as the viewers of Thames Television suddenly became viewers of London Weekend Television, the other independent franchisee for London. You can see video of the changeover here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxva6S6OLEg&NR=1
There was even a separate national franchisee for morning television supplied to all the regions. (More than one, actually; the first one went broke trying.)
So while there was some attempt to brand themselves in a unified way as "ITV", it was more the way a trade association tries to present a unified face to an audience - rather than the solid branding of a network, they'd unify behind a joint marketing campaign, the way that a multitude of local milk providers in the US united behind the catchphrase "Got milk?".
However, and this is another difference between US and UK broadcasters, the ITV regional franchise holders did run more than one signal, because they were required to cover all of their franchise area. Here in the US, a broadcaster to a specific city of license might have a primary antenna and a repeater or two, and its up to the TV set owners to acquire (or contract with) some sort of antenna to receive it with. In the UK, if you were awarded the franchise for the London region, you managed signals that, together, blanketed the entire region - and if a viewer couldn't receive your signal and complained, it was up to you to install a repeater so that they could. So each regional broadcaster could be considered a "network" of sorts, since they run more than one full-strength signal, and a multitude of small ones.
Ultimately, however, whether you regard them as independent or not, that's what they called themselves: "Independent Television". If you want to berate me about that, you're berating the wrong guy.
