Edinburgh TV Festival moves to Manchester after 50 years as YouTube reshapes UK TV debate
Fifty years after it began in the Scottish capital, the Edinburgh TV Festival will move to Manchester next year, organizers confirmed, ending an era just as the TV business faces mounting financial pressure. Pedro Pina, YouTube's EMEA boss, used this year's McTaggart lecture to tell a skeptical audience the platform is "not the villain." Public broadcaster executives pushed back hard in their own panels: ITV's Kevin Lygo compared YouTube's £3 million UK content pledge with ITV's own £1.2 billion in annual spend, and Channel 5's Ben Frow said his network still makes more money through traditional distribution than through YouTube. BBC director-general Matt Brittin, Pina's former boss at Google, was notably less combative toward his old employer and floated the idea of a BBC local-news product to compete with it.
Budgets tell the commissioning story more clearly than any panel discussion. Channel 5's Frow said he can fund only a handful of shows at £400,000 an hour, compared with plenty at £35,000 an hour, and Channel 4 flagged slower decision-making while it searches for a new director of programs. Streamers kept commissioning at pace: Netflix used its panel to unveil nine new UK shows, including two 'Top Boy' spin-offs, a Roald Dahl series and a Kate Winslet-led drama, while Disney+ cited a group target to triple local originals. Media buyers weighing UK content deals and ad inventory across broadcasters and streamers should expect public-service budgets to stay tight while YouTube's share of the conversation, and of viewing figures, keeps growing.