Joint MD of Talented People Kimberly Godbolt writes from the last TV Festival in Edinburgh before its move to Manchester in 2027.
Another year at Edinburgh, another week of trying to be in six rooms at once. If you weren’t there (or were, but had the same problem), here’s what actually matters from a week that was, frankly, the most YouTube-obsessed Edinburgh ever.
The short version: pure TV, on its own, isn’t a strategy anymore. Not for broadcasters, not for indies, and not for freelancers building a career. Where audiences watch has properly fragmented, and the smartest people in the industry are now building portfolios, not picking a lane.
YouTube is everywhere, and nobody’s fully sorted on it yet
YouTube overtook the BBC in monthly UK audience reach for the first time in December, and it had its own dedicated Spotlight session at Edinburgh this year, alongside a MacTaggart lecture from VP of YouTube EMEA’s Pedro Pina. But sit in enough rooms and you notice something: the platform’s own messaging (calm, collaborative, “we’re not a competitor”) sits oddly next to reporting elsewhere that YouTube executives are privately “scared shitless” about Netflix poaching their top talent, offering deals worth up to $10m to keep creators exclusive. Meanwhile the BBC has just posted a brand new “Head of Multi-Platform Commissioning” role, and confirmed some content will now be made specifically for iPlayer and YouTube and never touch a broadcast channel at all.
Translation: if you’ve been quietly ignoring YouTube as “not real TV,” this is the year to stop.
The ownership conversation is back, everywhere
One of the sharpest sessions of the week was a live recording of the US podcast The Town, with Jane Root (Nutopia), Dimitri Doganis (Raw) and Patrick Holland (Banijay UK) – three of the most senior people in unscripted, talking with total candour about who actually owns what gets made. Doganis’s line about Raw’s Netflix hits (Tinder Swindler, Don’t F*** with Cats) was blunt: “that is an endless source of pride and pain,” because streamer deals typically mean no rights retention and no back end. Root’s answer at Nutopia is to make shows directly for YouTube with major names like Will Smith and Trevor Noah, own the IP outright, then use success there as leverage to sell a bigger version elsewhere.
If you’re a freelancer, worth asking your production company or boss early on who owns what you’re making, because that question is being renegotiated across the whole industry right now and could influence how successful/far reaching your project will be.
Consolidation isn’t a prediction anymore, it’s just happening
Banijay and All3Media have completed their merger, creating the world’s largest independent production company. Sky has agreed to buy ITV’s networks and streaming business. The Paramount/Warner Bros Discovery merger is still paused pending a US legal challenge, but the direction of travel across the whole industry is the same: scale, or struggle. For freelancers, this usually means both more opportunity (bigger combined slates, more genres under one roof) and more uncertainty (restructuring, role duplication, redundancies) in the same breath.
The BBC is in genuine reinvention mode
New Director-General Matt Brittin, 102 days into the job when he spoke, didn’t hold back: he called the licence fee “yesterday’s model” and “a busted flush,” and openly asked “if we were inventing the BBC today, what would we do?” He’s finding £500m in savings and cutting around 10% of staff, while also trying to build a more YouTube-literate, faster-moving BBC. Worth watching closely if you work with or want to work with the corporation over the next 18 months, particularly on how terms of trade with indies evolve.
What we’re taking from all of this
That the freelancers thriving right now are the ones with a genuinely varied skillset (comfortable across broadcast, digital, and direct-to-audience formats) and a clear sense of who owns what they make. That’s exactly the kind of career navigation conversation we have with people inside The A List, our membership community for senior unscripted freelancers – if you want more of the detail behind everything above, plus the sessions we haven’t covered here, that’s where we’re sharing it.
As ever, if you’re a company (or brand) looking for senior talent, or a freelancer wondering where you fit in all this, you know where we are.
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