It is Monday morning at the broadcaster and the ratings for Saturday night are in. The new quiz did well, the costly drama on Sunday did not. By lunchtime the channel controller has to decide whether the drama gets a second series, whether the quiz moves to a better slot, and what that means for the money left this year. The channel controller is the person who decides what a channel is for, and then spends its programme budget to make that true.

What a channel controller does

A broadcaster or streaming service usually has several channels or brands, each with its own audience. The channel controller runs one of them. They set the editorial strategy (what kind of viewer, what tone, what share of drama, entertainment, factual and news), and they have the last word on the biggest commissions. The day-to-day buying of new shows is done by commissioning editors, who pitch their best projects to the controller for approval.

The controller also owns the shape of the schedule. The scheduler builds the hour-by-hour grid, but the controller decides the big moves, such as which night carries the flagship drama or when a returning series comes back. Bought-in films and series from the head of acquisitions fill the gaps that commissions do not.

Responsibilities

  • Set the editorial identity and audience of the channel or service
  • Approve major commissions and decide which series come back
  • Divide the annual programme budget across genres and slots
  • Shape the schedule with the scheduler, especially peak time
  • Decide the mix of original commissions and acquired programmes
  • Read audience figures and adjust the strategy when a slot fails
  • Answer for the channel's output to the board and, where they exist, to regulators

How the role touches the budget

Directly, but from the top. The controller does not see production cost reports. They hold the programme budget of the channel and split it into envelopes per genre and slot. A peak-time drama hour costs many times a daytime magazine hour, so every big commission is a choice against other programmes. The price a broadcaster pays for a programme is often called the tariff, and the controller decides how high the tariff can go for each slot. What happens inside the production budget after that is the business of the production company.

How people get into the role

Almost always from commissioning. Most controllers were commissioning editors first, and before that producers or executive producers at production companies, so they know what programmes cost to make. Some come from scheduling or channel strategy.

At a streamer

Streaming services rarely use the word controller. The same job sits with a head of content or a director of programming for a country or genre. There is no fixed schedule, so the decisions are about which titles to launch when, and what to promote on the home screen.