Bland dreams of BT:TV

NEWS BT's chairman Sir Christopher Bland has been making nostalgic remarks in the Sunday papers about turning the company into a broadcasting organisation, with the capacity to make its own programmes. Bland's comments in The Sunday Times contained little that was new, but they confirm what BT watchers have suspected for a long time - that he's eager to dust off his television hat and get the telco seriously into broadcasting. He has said the company will be "pretty clear" on its plans by April. One far-fetched possibility, which Bland notably refused to dismiss, was the possibility of BT creating its own content or buying stakes in companies which create it for them. The nearest thing BT has to a video content business is the remains of BTopenworld's portal operation. However, for these offerings BT is only operating as a platform, providing billing and hosting - it doesn't own stakes in any of the companies which originate the content, a spokesman from BTopenworld said. BT has been trying to move into TV for some time. In November it applied for a local delivery service licence, which will allow it to start offering video content. The licence will be awarded soon, according to the Independent Television Commission. The details of this application have not been made public, but BT will almost certainly broadcast over existing copper lines using DSL technology. BT already allows other companies such as Home Choice to broadcast over its network. BT will face several challenges before it can move into broadcasting. For all the chairman's TV experience, broadcasting is a radically different business from the company's core skills of maintaining a massive network of copper and fibre optic cables and selling access to it. Worse still, BT is still short of cash, and the City is unlikely to endorse spending large sums of money on stakes in TV content companies when the group has spent the last twelve months trying to free itself of crippling debt. James Harper, analyst at Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, said: "I think they would have a difficult time convincing the markets that they should be investing in this, given the debt reduction process they have been going through." In fact, the next big item on BT's corporate agenda is not entering a new business, it's a further split. The issue of selling off the company's local access network from the customer services and other parts of the business has been kicking around all year. Now mmO2, the company's former mobile arm, has been demerged, further splits now top the agenda. But if, as Bland says in The Sunday Times, "the mobile business had such different characteristics to the rest of the company that a demerger made sense", how much sense will a video content creation business make?