Ownership and Funding

Ownership Concepts

Public Service Broadcasting

The idea of PSB was created when the English started to broadcast radio and they didn't want commercial broadcasting because they thought it was exploiting the audiences by making very low effort content but  profiting massively due to the amount of adverts that were broadcast. The BBC is a good example of PSB, it has a license fee that television owners have to own in order to access its contents.

Commercial Broadcasting

Commercial broadcasting is the opposite to PSBs they use adverts to make money, ITV is one of the biggest examples of commercial broadcasting. BBC is the only publicly owned TV broadcasting company, ITV is privately owned.

Global companies are companies that operate in multiple countries, they are usually big companies that own many other companies. These are called conglomerates. Here are some examples of big companies that own sub companies.








Vertical integration is when a company try to own all the different sectors of the process of releasing a project, this is to maximise profits, if a company produces a film they're not going to want to pass it on to another company for them to make more money off it. Walt Disney is an example of a company that follows this integration.

Horizontal integration is when companies try to acquire competing companies to expand their business while also taking away the competition. These are several examples of horizontal integration.

Funding Types

The licence fee was introduced by the BBC because they didn't want to commercially broadcast. A licence fee is a fee some broadcasters charge to view their channels.

A subscription is similar to a licence fee, a big difference is that subscription fee are based on monthly or yearly payments. Things like Netflix and Amazon Prime video use subscriptions.

There are things like DVDs and blue-rays, that only require a one off payment, although this is very quickly becoming outdated.

Pay per views are usually for sports events, you pay for one single event, this is a very good way to make money if there is a massive sporting event happening. For example it's used a lot for boxing matches. Sky box office is a pay per view website.

Sponsorship is a big way to make money in movies and TV, people could get paid to wear things, or to promote a certain product. This can make a lot of money for the people promoting things based on how well known they are. Certain programs on commercial channels have sponsors, shown just before the program starts. 

Advertising has some overlap with sponsorship, sponsorship is a kind of advertising, the main kind most people will be familiar with would be adverts on TV, this is how commercial channels make their money.

Product placement is when a TV or film is paid by a company to show their product, for example if someone was drinking, coca-cola could pay the production company for that person to drinking coke.  

Private capital is when a production company is given money to make a product as a loan, or for a percentage of the revenue the project produces. Many of these are partnered with banks, for example Barclays have a private capital/equity firm.

Development funding is when a big company, for example the BFI, funds small projects that are unlikely to be commercially financed in the early stages of development, giving small film makers a chance to have a funded project.

Crowd-funding is a method of getting funded by asking the public for money, websites like Kickstarter or Gofundme, are very popular examples, this is could be a very good way of getting funded if you are a small film maker or you couldn't get funded any other way. There are downsides, for example this method has a very small success rate, because anyone can pitch anything, there tends to be a lot of none-serious projects. This makes it harder to get noticed.