New ITV streaming service offers viewers a little tra
ITV bosses have unveiled a “whizzbang” version of streaming service ITVHub.
ITVX will carry new shows up to nine months before they air on the main TV channels.
The aim is to lure in viewers who don’t watch much on ITV – then persuade them to stay thanks to the wealth of other programming on offer.
The move comes as the broadcaster increases its efforts to compete with streaming giants such as Netflix and Amazon.
ITV wants to double its digital revenues to at least £750million by 2026.
It has already ring-fenced £160million to spend on ITVX next year, part of a £1.35billion programmes budget.
ITVX will be advertiser-funded and so free to view. But an ad-free version, with extra content and access to existing subscription service BritBox, will also be available. Its cost has not yet been revealed.
Enhanced
To entice viewers to use ITVX, every week one major new series will be released online, including dramas, comedies and factual shows.
In addition, most new dramas will be available to “binge” and once they start airing on ITV, the rest of the series will drop as a box set on ITVX.
Big-budget shows coming early to the enhanced streaming service include period espionage drama A Spy Among Friends, starring Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce; The Confessions Of Frannie Langton, starring Karla-Simone Spence and Sophie Cookson; Sir Lenny Henry’s autobiographical drama Three Little Birds and Russian spy drama Litvinenko, starring David Tennant.
Comedy offerings will kick off with a feature film of ITV2 show Plebs, while factual shows include a documentary about the controversy around Bill Cosby plus a natural history series, A Year On Planet Earth, narrated by Stephen Fry.
And from the US, ITV has secured hit teen comedy-drama The Sex Lives Of College Girls.
ITVX will also carry 500 films in its first year, plus a huge archive library running to 15,000 hours – compared with 4,000 hours of content currently available on ITV Hub.
Kevin Lygo, ITV managing director, said that using advertising to fund the new service – making it free – was different to anything else on offer.
He said: “In a crowded market of streamers, we’re carving out a very interesting place because when people feel they have enough subscriptions, they can watch us for free.
“Think of it as a super-charged, whizz-bang version of the Hub.”
Dame Carolyn McCall, ITV chief executive, said the proportion of ITV programming which would become “digital first” was around 20 per cent.
She said there were advantages to using ITVX: “If you sit tight and you watch ITV on linear, and you don’t go to ITVX, you will wait for that content. It could take six months, it could be nine months…it might never come.
“As a consumer of ITVX you can get it free and watch it early, or you can pay to watch it ad-free.”
She said the network was responding to changing viewer habits and only “a fraction” of its audience would watch dramas early on ITVX.
“In the greater scale of eight to nine million viewers we get for some of our drama premieres, it will be a fraction who are coming to ITVX. We know that from experience. It won’t feel tired when it gets to linear,” she said.
Yesterday, shares in ITV tumbled by up to 18 per cent as investors baulked at the level of investment needed to drive the digital overhaul.
This was despite ITV reporting a 48 per cent surge in pre-tax profits to £480million last year, with total ad revenues rising 24 per cent to £2billion – the highest in its history.