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UK broadcasters slashed their spending on big-budget TV shows to the lowest level in almost a decade last year, even as their US rivals Netflix, Disney and Amazon ploughed hundreds of millions more into British-made premium content.
In a sign of the increasing competitive pressures of the streaming era, the amount spent on high-end TV shows costing more than £1m an hour to make by domestic operators such as the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky, plunged by a quarter last year to £598m.
Stripping out the anomaly of 2020, when Covid shut down all film and TV production, this is the lowest level of investment since the £439m recorded in 2015, according to latest annual figures released by the British Film Institute, the industry body, on Thursday.
While UK broadcasters remained under pressure – last year Channel 4 made its deepest job cuts in more than 15 years while Sky axed 1,000 roles in response to the shift away from satellite TV – investment from primarily US based media firms surged by a quarter.
Spend on British-made shows by the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Disney increased almost £600m year on year to £2.82bn in 2024. “Inward investment” on shows such as Netflix’s The Immortal Man, a Peaky Blinders continuation, and Rowan Atkinson series Man vs Baby accounted for 82% of the total £3.44bn spent on premium TV production in the UK last year.
Industry figures such as Jane Featherstone, the co-founder of Sister, which co-produced Black Doves and Chernobyl, have warned that UK broadcasters are being “priced out” of the high-end TV production market.
Last month, Peter Kosminsky, the director of Wolf Hall, provided written evidence to a select committee of MPs investigating the UK production market stating that he, the producer, the writer, and the star, Mark Rylance, had had to take “significant” pay cuts to get a second series of the Golden Globe-winning drama made because no streamer would co-fund it.
Nevertheless, the BFI figures showed the UK high-end TV market returned to growth last year, having shrunk by 39%, just over £2bn, between 2022 and 2023 as the post-pandemic rush to restock content for viewers ground to a halt.
Last year, the total amount spent on high-end TV programmes produced in the UK grew by 11%, from £3.09bn to £3.44bn.
The figures also revealed the dramatic effects of the surging costs of making productions and signing talent, with the increase in overall spend coming despite more than 40 fewer premium TV shows being made last year.
In 2024, the BFI recorded 181 high-end TV productions, compared with 223 in 2023, the fewest since Covid hit in 2020.
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In the UK film production market, spend on making blockbusters such as Jurassic World Rebirth, How to Train Your Dragon and the remake of The Running Man grew by almost a quarter to £2.12bn.
As with the high-end TV market, almost 90% of this spend came from the main Hollywood film studios such as Disney and Universal. In total, 191 productions were completed or started last year – 131 fewer than in 2023 and the fewest since 2020.
The BFI said the figures showed the impact of the long-running Hollywood actors and writers strikes in 2023. “As a consequence of the strikes, many film and high-end TV productions were paused or start dates were postponed, which impacted UK production spend over [three quarters of 2023] as well as rescheduling production starts in 2024,” it said.
Overall, the combined spend on film and high-end TV production in the UK last year was £5.6bn, up significantly on the £4.7bn in 2023.
