Independents Facing Collapse After BBC Financial Problems

Independents are being told by the BBC that they will need to push delivery back to the next financial year or find other ways of funding productions due to the BBC's expenditure of this financial year's budget.

BBC commissioners have notified producers that they can no longer fund greenlit shows to production until further funds are available within the next financial year beginning, April 2010 or the following years beginning April 2011.

Drama and animation productions are thought to be the worst hit and the situation could pose severe risks to big long-term projects, with extended periods of waiting time before production or forcing producers to go in to production early, if they can secure extra funding options.

A well-known company told Broadcast, "This is posing a serious problem for productions due to deliver in 2011/12. There is no money to make them and there won't be until April 2011 - but making and delivering any big production in a year is impossible."

"If you are not delivering until 2012 and you are not part of a major group, you simply cannot shoulder the cost. We could go out of business."

Another major company predicted that a number of indies would collapse because of the problem. The managing director of the company commented, "Cash flow is the life blood of a company, so this really a matter of life and death."

Barclays and Ingenious also have both said they had seen an increase in producers attempting to bridge finance gaps on BBC projects.

However BBC's Bal Samra, director of vision operations and director of business affairs and rights commented, "This year, the BBC has actually increased the finance made available to cash flow programme."

He continued, "We also use banks and other deals like indies financing themselves - it is done on a case to case basis. Understandably, there is pressure from producers to go into production as soon as a commission is received. If any producer is concerned about their money, we encourage them to come and talk to us about it so we can resolve it."

(Source Broadcast)