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TWST: Can we start with a quick overview of Television Corporation (London:TCP.L) and how you are positioned today?

Mr. Foulser: We are in the TV production and facilities business with the emphasis on production. About 65 to 75 percent of our turnover is programming and content related. We are trying to position the business more and more towards content and towards intellectual property ownership. We’ve got a couple of really big production companies, which are the engine drivers. One of them is called Sunset +Vine, which is a live sports production company, but it also produces advertiser funded programming like Gillette World Sport, which goes to near enough 200 countries around the world every week. Then there’s a company called Mentorn, which produces entertainment and factual programs. One of the ones you would know in the States is called “Robot Wars” which has been pretty successful for us. We have a big international sales operation set up to distribute the ideas which we create either in formats or completed programs. We also have a big outside broadcast business, Visions, which provides facilities for sporting events and top concerts. And we’ve got a post-production facility, Molinare, which does video, editing and graphics. We spent the last year getting rid of some businesses that didn’t work. One was an interest that we had in offshore powerboat racing which we got out of last April. Another was a company called Pacifica Media Affiliates, which is an audio postproduction facility in California which we just agreed to sell. So, hopefully we’ll have sold- that in a couple of week’s time.

TWST: How do you differentiate yourself from other production companies?

Mr. Foulser: I think we have a lot of diversity in our production and our ideas, and we can create properties across a number of genres while a lot of companies would concentrate specifically in one area like entertainment or quiz shows. Our programming ranges from the BBC’s flagship current affairs show “Question Time”, through entertainment formats like “Britain’s Worst” to the most watched sports magazine programme in the world, “Gillette World Sport”. Because of the amount of different creativity we have in the group, we can create formats and ideas in different areas.

TWST: What are some of your key objectives looking to the next twelve or eighteen months?

Mr. Foulser: We will increasingly be going in the area where we own if not all, then at least a big chunk of the intellectual property and ideas that we create or we buy. As a sign for the direction we’re going, we took an interest in a company called Ludus, a format creation business. They make quiz shows. They were formally known as Action Time and they were owned by a Carlton, a big U.K. broadcaster. They are out of that now, so we’ve got a tie up with them are trying to roll out their ideas around the world. The emphasis is on creating big international properties, which have a global reach, and also have the ancillary benefits of merchandising and licensing, i.e. the selling of videos and DVDs and so on. For example, along with the sale of Robot Wars programming to China, we have signed a major merchandise deal to roll the brand as a whole into the country. We want to have control over our own destiny rather than being reliant on the whims of commissioning editors, so we’re looking at ways of protecting our future by owning the intellectual property that we create.