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Endemol Shine boss defends M&A

Endemol Shine Group (ESG) president Tim Hincks has defended foreign investment in UK indies, insisting the M&A activity currently sweeping the industry is not hampering creativity.

Tim Hincks

Tim Hincks

Speaking for the first time since the Endemol, Shine and Core Media merger last December, Hincks said M&A activity did not affect companies’ creative output, adding that the world has “woken up to great content.”

“I don’t believe for a minute that foreign ownership, consolidation or, indeed, size or scale means one thing or the other for creativity,” he said. “There are some brilliant big companies and terrible ones, and some brilliant small companies and some absolutely terrible ones,” Hincks said in his Bafta TV lecture this week.

The wave of US firms snapping up UK TV interests has been criticised by the likes of Channel 4 CEO David Abraham, who said the trend could stifle the country’s creativity.

But Hincks also warned of “little England arguments about the way our creative economy runs” and urged the TV community not to “turn back the clock on progress.”

The exec, who branded the UK TV industry “hideously middle class,” also used his speech to defend the UK’s terms of trade for indies, which both Abraham and BBC director of television Danny Cohen have called to be revised.

The terms have been heavily criticised recently amid the ESG merger, ITV’s prodco buying spree and All3Media’s sale to Discovery Communications.

But Hincks added: “The terms of trade work, they protect creatives and they fundamentally speak to an argument which I think is incontrovertibly true: when you create content, you should be given a fair share of what you create.”

Hincks said it would be “young, small indies that would suffer” should the terms change, rather than big producers.

He also said he supported the idea of BBC Studios – BBC’s move to establish an independent production division – but warned it must be an “entirely transparent” process. “It’s a very bold move and the BBC isn’t getting much credit,” said Hincks. “It’s a significant cultural change and it has to be applauded.”

He added that the TV community was also in danger of “worshipping the niche,” continuing: “I think we’ve become obsessed with this notion of risk, and – a bit like creativity – we don’t really know what it means.”

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