BBC loses Voice to ITV

UK commercial broadcaster ITV has taken singing competition format The Voice from the BBC, with the pubcaster saying it did not want to get into a bidding war for the show.

Talpa Media format The Voice

The fifth season of the Saturday night show, which debuts early 2016, will be the last on BBC1, ending months of speculation that ITV would step in to take the rights.

Mark Linsey, BBC’s acting director of television, said: “We always said we wouldn’t get into a bidding war or pay inflated prices to keep the show and it’s testament to how the BBC has built the programme up – and established it into a mainstay of the Saturday night schedule – that another broadcaster has poached it.”

ITV already offers Simon Cowell’s Britain’s Got Talent and singing show The X Factor although the latter has struggled for ratings recently, prompting speculation over its future.

The Voice creator John de Mol has been trying to get the BBC to run a junior version of the show over the last few years but to no avail, however it is understood ITV is now also lining up that project.

It’s likely that ITV Studios’s £355m (US$531.7m) acquisition of Del Mol’s production firm, Talpa Media, earlier in the year played a part in the broadcaster’s decision to go for the show.

ITV missed out on The Voice in 2011 after the BBC won rights for £20m – but the deal has since been criticised by the likes of UK culture secretary John Whittingdale, who questioned whether it was the right way to spend licence fee payers’ money,

Last month, ITV called for the BBC to be banned from remaking international formats such as The Voice.

The new deal with ITV has not been finalised, but an announcement is expected imminently. It is expected to air The Voice in 2017.

Wall to Wall, part of the Warner Bros-owned Shed Media group, produces the UK version of The Voice with Talpa and has a contract for at least the next two seasons.