President of Viacom

A dramatic change to British television will come from the imminent deregulation of the industry. Some believe the UK will be swamped by a tidal wave of American commercial broadcasting.

The largest media conglomerate in the world is Viacom, which owns everything from CBS to MTV. Viacom's boss is over here, some think to check out the competition.

Our Business correspondent Paul Mason met him.

PAUL MASON:
Globalisation has been knocking on the door of the British broadcast industry for some time. Now the door is opened. New rules mean that, for the first time, US companies can own commercial TV stations here. The big prize is ITV and potential buyers don't come any bigger than Viacom, the global media empire that owns some of the hottest property on the box.

Its boss is here for a big TV industry bash, so has he come with his cheque book handy?

MEL KARMAZIN:
I do have my cheque book. I don't think that on this trip I am going to use it, other than having some good restaurant meals. We love doing business in the UK. Our company is very committed here. We have over 11,000 employees. We operate 14 channels. We would love to see ourselves expand. We think the opportunity of foreign ownership rules changing was a terrific opportunity for us that we could look at the possibility, if somebody were interested in selling, that we could be interested in buying. I would love to be able to see our company expand its position in the UK, but there is nothing that we are currently in talks to do.

PAUL MASON:
It had been assumed that any new entrant would simply buy ITV, but TV executives have also been floating the idea of a new channel, Channel 6, to rival the ailing ITV network. He is not ruling that out either.

MEL KARMAZIN:
I don't know whether or not the best alternative for our company and its shareholders would be to acquire something or to start something. I think that we leave the doors open to any alternative.

PAUL MASON:
The fear here is that a big American broadcaster comes in, starts dumping cheap American products on to the UK market. A kind of video Prozac. What's your response to that?

MEL KARMAZIN:
With all due respect, I think it's the dumbest thing I have heard. The only way somebody is going to justify the price that they pay for an asset here, because it will not be cheap, is to programme in a way that the audience is going to want to watch it. Our experience throughout the world is that what counts is local, local, local programming.

PAUL MASON:
But can you see where the fear comes from? Why people not just here, but across the European Union, are worried about what they think of as American cultural imperialism?

MEL KARMAZIN:
Anybody that were going to come into the UK and want to fill the channel, whatever channel that would be, with programming from the US, that would be a dumb model that would fail, that would be taking investors' money and throwing it down the drain.

PAUL MASON:
Five big global media companies effectively control the market, and in every country they have been pushing back the power of national regulators.

People's worries about the big media majors is not so much about quality, because sure Frasier and Friends are great, it's about the diversity, all the programmes you make are generally about the same kind of world?

MEL KARMAZIN:
I don't believe there is a sameness about CBS news and the Osbournes. They are being done by the same company but I don't know what the sameness is of those two entities. The company that has Nickelodeon and the Rug Rats is also the same company that is dealing with other MTV programming and CBS programming and Paramount films.

PAUL MASON:
Now Ofcom is here and we've got a new frame work of regulation for the TV industry. Viacom is already a stakeholder in the UK broadcast industry through MTV and Nickelodeon. So does the man from Viacom have concerns about how the UK TV market is going to work?

MEL KARMAZIN:
The difficulty in competing in this market is the BBC. There is no question that you are competing with an unfair, a not level playing field.

PAUL MASON:
What exactly would you like to happen with the BBC?

MEL KARMAZIN:
I think I would like to see the BBC not use the public's money to, in its digital channels, to take this with again all due respect, to rip of Nickelodeon. We have kids' programming. We make a significant investment in our kids' programming and the BBC is able to get three channels or that number of channels dealing with kids, and use the platform to drive audience to it, so it makes it harder for us to compete. That's OK, we understand the market place, and we are prepared to do that. But it is an obstacle when people are competing in this country, and one that I would welcome the opportunity of competing even more with the BBC, if the opportunity came up for us to acquire more assets here.

PAUL MASON:
Soon the ITV companies will find out if they are allowed to merge. If they are, they will dominate commercial TV here. And provided the price is right, ITV could find itself part of the Viacom empire. Globalisation is coming to a TV screen in your living room, ready or not.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.