Carlton Communications

I see Carlton as being about making content for channels for platforms. These are our three businesses: content, channels, and a digital platform. ... Delivering good content is key to attracting audiences and advertisers alike. We forget that at our peril. Our success in migrating to digital will largely depend on the content proposition we offer our viewers. Carlton Communications PLC is incorporated and listed on the London Stock Exchange. The company makes several key acquisitions and launches the Carlton Food Network. The company continues to make large acquisitions and forms an alliance with TF1, a venture to operate European Internet businesses. Carlton Communications PLC has thrived for more than a decade in the cramped, highly regulated waters of the British market. During the 1990s, it began buying companies, both smaller and larger than itself. Besides owning U.K. television networks, the company provides production facilities, tape duplicating services, and electronic video equipment, which are marketed primarily in Europe and the United States. In the new millennium, when faced with the challenge of securing advertising dollars, the company has focused its interests on free and pay television, content creation, and media services. Michael Green, the man who brought Carlton Communications from obscurity into the league of $1 billion companies, grew up in a business-oriented family. Rather than relying on higher education (he left public school at age 17), Green benefited from contacts through the family of his wife, Janet Wolfson, whom he married in 1972. Those contacts included Janet's brother David, with whom Green established a printing and photo-processing company dubbed Tangent Industries, and Lord Wolfson, Green's father-in-law, who owned Great Universal Stores, which hired Tangent to reproduce its catalogs. Sometimes Carlton seemed a bit ahead of its time, as in the 1986 purchase of satellite dish manufacturer Skyscan, which was sold in 1988 due to poor sales. Carlton's biggest buy of the decade proved more fortuitous. The company paid $780 million for Ronald Perleman's U.S.-based Technicolor, the world market leader in videocassette duplication and motion picture film processing. Despite the 1987 stock market crash, Green was able to raise the necessary funds. In five brisk years, Green transformed Carlton from a relatively obscure company into an international corporation that garnered half its revenues (since the Technicolor purchase) from U.S. operations. Although Carlton aborted a venture with the German station Vox, it invested in two other overseas ventures in 1995. France Télé Films, a cable channel launched in cooperation with France Télévision, would rely on programming from Carlton's CTE library (stocked with 4,000 hours as of 1995, including 200 films) as well as that of France Télévision. Carlton also entered a partnership with Singapore's Channel KTV, also cable-based, which prepared to add two karaoke channels to its existing services. Almost half of Carlton's profits came from broadcast television in 1995. In spite of the growth of satellite and cable services, Carlton remained optimistic about the importance of free-to-air broadcasting. Nigel Walmsley, Carlton's director for Broadcasting, told shareholders in a 1995 annual report that only terrestrial broadcasting reached mass audiences since cable and satellite channels "tend to take audience share from existing minority channels, thus fragmenting the total cable and satellite audience." Notably, the acquisition of Cinema Media extended Carlton's advertising sales capability from television onto the big screen. Cinema Media, renamed Carlton Screen Advertising, quickly became a market leader distributing promotional materials to cinemas throughout the United Kingdom. Carlton's acquisition of Westcountry Television expanded their coverage to 39 percent of the U.K. population. And the acquisition of Action Time brought one of Europe's