Acquisitions
During 1985, US video company, Abekas Video Systems, was purchased for £52.8 million.[12] In 1986, it bought the Complete Post facility, one of the largest production facilities in Hollywood, for $31 million. It also acquired Post Perfect, a post-production company in New York. In March 1987 it acquired Modern Video Productions in Philadelphia for $48 million.[13]
Carlton purchased Skyscan, the satellite dish manufacturer, in 1986. The company was sold on in 1988 because of slow sales and continuing delays in new start-up television services. Carlton's biggest acquisition of the decade came in October 1988, when it bought Technicolor SA for $780m, which led to Carlton becoming the world's largest producer of video cassette duplication and motion picture film processing, serving Hollywood studios and software companies. A year later, Carlton bought United Engineering Industries (UEI) plc for £580m, incorporating Quantel and Solid State Logic, which designed and manufactured professional video and sound products. Carlton later disposed of Solid State Logic in 1999 and Quantel in 2000.[14]
In January 1992, Carlton strengthened its media library when it acquired Pickwick Video, which in turn was re-branded and merged with the existing Carlton library to create Carlton Visual Entertainment. The company acquired a 20% stake in GMTV a month after it won the ITV breakfast franchise 1991 and bought 18% stake in Independent Television News in 1993.[7] Carlton increased its stake in Central Television to 81% in 1994[7] and two years later added Westcountry Television to its portfolio.[7] The acquisition of Central made Carlton one of the largest television producers in the UK, when Action Time and Planet 24 were added to the company's holding.[15]
The future Prime Minister, David Cameron was director of corporate affairs at Carlton from July 1994 to February 2001, his only venture into employment outside of the political world.[16][17]
Carlton expanded its non-TV interests by acquiring the Rank Organisation's film library as well as the cinema advertising company Cinema Media (formerly Rank Screen Advertising), the UK's largest cinema sales house at the time, from The Rank Group,[18][19] renaming it Carlton Screen Advertising. In 1997, along with Granada and British Sky Broadcasting, Carlton bid successfully for the UK national digital terrestrial television licence. Sky was excluded from the eventual company, ONdigital, for competition reasons, and this marked the start of Granada and Carlton working more closely together.[20] That same year, it announced its intention to sell its 15% stake in Home TV, a general entertainment channel in India, which was failing. Channel KTV, based in Singapore, went bankrupt earlier that year; Carlton owned a 31% stake.[21]
In early January 1999, the company bought the ITC television and film library from PolyGram/Seagram for £91 million, which reunited the programme library of Associated Television and Central Television and doubled the stock of its library division Carlton International, by giving it a total of 15,000 hours of programming. Carlton chairman Michael Green said: "The ITC library is a jewel in the crown. We can now unite it with the other gems from Britain's film and television heritage in our excellent library."[22] From September 1999, Central Broadcasting and Westcountry Television were re-branded as Carlton.[23] This later paved the way for the eventual downgrading of all of ITV's regional identities, though the names were never fully dropped as their news programmes Central News and Westcountry Live continued, and eventually returned to the air (albeit as ITV1 Central and ITV1 Westcountry) in 2004. In 2000, United Business & Media proposed a merger with Carlton.[24] However, the parties were outmanoeuvred by Granada, which took over only the television interests of UNM (the rest of the company remained in existence). The broadcasting arm of HTV (though not the majority of its production operations) were sold to Carlton.
In 1999, Technicolor continued expansion with the acquisitions of wholly owned businesses in Canada and Australia and started the development of digital cinema within two years. In 2001, Technicolor was sold to Thomson multimedia for $1.9bn and[25] in 2002 ITV Digital (the renamed ONdigital) collapsed.[26]
