Pact UK Television Census 2021

The Pact Census is an annual survey detailing the characteristics and evolution of the television production landscape within the UK and has been conducted by Oliver and Ohlbaum since 2008.

UK independent TV production sector revenues were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, falling to £2.9 billion in 2020, a 14% decline on 2019 and also the lowest total since 2017. Despite the decline in total sector revenues, those derived from International activities reached more than £1 billion for the second year in a row. This strong performance was driven largely by international primary commissions and secondary programme rights sales. Revenues generated by commissions from SVOD players such as Netflix and Amazon Prime continued to make up a strong segment of total international primary commissions revenues in 2020, increasing again, albeit a slower rate than recent years, reaching £356 million.

Domestic TV revenues were hit hardest by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, declining by £257 million, a fall of 13%, as a result of a reduction in primary commissioning spend from the UK, to reach the lowest levels since 2011. However, secondary rights revenues increased to over £500 million as producers focused on other revenue sources while production activities were disrupted or cancelled.

After several consecutive years of growth, spend on UK external drama commissions fell in 2020 with entertainment replacing drama as the most valuable genre, accounting for one third of UK external commissioning spend in 2020. Factual entertainment’s share of total UK external primary commissioning spend increased the most in 2020, demonstrating producers’ ability to make this kind of content more easily during the pandemic.

Within UK external primary commissioning, spend on new commissions declined from 41% of the total in 2019 to 30% in 2020. The BBC was the largest spender on new commissions, despite a decline on previous years, whilst ITV and Channel 4 slightly increased their spend on new programming and Channel 5 proportionally spent the most.

Despite declining commissioning spend across the sector, the proportion spent on commissions outside of London grew to 45% with Wales and South West England accounting for more than half of all commissioning spend outside of London.

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