U.K. public service broadcaster ITV launched proprietary streamer ITVX almost exactly 12 months ago with a star-studded event in London featuring talent including Helen Bonham Carter (the lead in ITVX original “Nolly”) and “Without Sin” star Vicky McClure.
Signalling its commitment to the new platform (which replaced much-maligned catch-up service ITV Hub), ITV CEO Carolyn McCall also directed $1.6 billion into original content for ITVX in 2023 alone, a bold move which briefly hit the company’s share price. “I know the London stock market was quite surprised,” she told PvNew earlier this year. “But we knew that we had to do that to make this step change. Because without that, we wouldn’t be a powerful U.K. streamer.”
ITVX is primarily a free-to-watch AVOD platform, echoing ITV’s position as a commercial PSB, although it does offer an ad-free premium tier which also offers paying subscribers access to BritBox U.K, an additional streaming platform that was co-founded by the BBC and ITV before the latter bought out the former.
As its first anniversary approaches, ITV’s managing director for streaming Rufus Radcliffe sat down to reflect on ITVX’s journey, its competition and the VOD landscape at large.
How would you sum up the past year?
If you said a year ago that we’d be where we are now, I think we would have said that’s a great result. With streaming services, there’s no finishing line, there’s always more to do, there’s always more to delight your viewers with. We ended up rolling out on over 12,000 individual device types so wherever there was ITV Hub we flipped it over to ITVX with way more content and a much better experience.
It’s been a very volatile market for streamers over the past 18 months. How have you dealt with that while rolling out the service?
ITV has been around since 1955 so everyone’s heard of us, everyone knows how to find us, everyone can probably list quite a lot of the content and the IP that we have. People understand what you’ll get from ITV and what we’ve done is translated that into the streaming arena. It is indisputably a very competitive marketplace out there. But we were very confident with the foundations that we had. And we can never take our viewers for granted. Every day, every night, you have to make the case for watching ITVX and why our content is really good and why people should spend their time with us.
Do you feel you have to compete with the U.S. streamers?
When you look at your U.S. streamers, whilst they might have local content strategies, they are unequivocally international and quite U.S.-focused in terms of the tonality and the experience. We have got some great U.S. content, we’ve got “Love and Death,” even some evergreen titles like “Dawson’s Creek” are doing fantastically. But ITV is a British brand and what we find in all of our research, and what viewers tell us, is they want a streamer which is British in its sensibility. So we’ve put ITV News very prominently on the homepage. The other thing we’ve really focused on is live.
Given the streaming landscape has shifted so dramatically, is a massive investment in content still a viable strategy?
Obviously, content is absolutely paramount to building a streaming service. Like all streaming services and like all media businesses, we are working out what works and what doesn’t work and how do you optimize window strategies and what should be exclusive and what should drop at the same time as linear. [Unlike] the pureplay streamers obviously we’ve got a big broadcast business and a streaming business and how those two work in sync to maximise viewing is a really big thing for us.
Do you think you’ll be dialling back a little bit on original content?
Our original content has done really, really well and it’s put ITVX on the map. We’ve also found some of the exclusive content drives people much deeper into the service as well, whether it’s “Nolly” or “Love and Death” or these big landmark shows. 85% of people who’ve watched exclusives have gone much deeper into the service [meaning they are spending longer on the platform] so the way you judge success of content is much more nuanced than previously. At what point do you even decide when a show is a hit? They live in perpetuity on the service, you can effectively repackage and relaunch the show every three to six months. The tyranny of the overnights is gone now.
ITV has pioneered a streaming-first approach, with exclusive content going on linear months later if at all. Is that strategy working?
You have to look at stuff on a case-by-case basis. We try and not be too dogmatic about it. We test and learn all the time. We’re now looking at how you stagger clusters of episodes as well, which is potentially quite interesting. What you’ve got to do is be prepared to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. And that’s what we’ll continue to do.
What’s the take-up been on ITVX Premium?
Really good. Advertising is how M&E [ITV’s Media and Entertainment department] makes its money and will continue to be. There is a segment of viewers who like ad-free and like BritBox and like that proposition but our laser focus has been on launching the free service and establishing that in the marketplace.
What are your plans for the future?
2024 is going to be a big year for ITV. We’ve got a big flagship sport event in the middle of the year, which is the Euros [soccer championship], which will be really important. We’ll continue to build the ITVX experience. One of the things everyone’s looking at is how do you get more advanced personalization and recommendations and how do you make sure the service is sticky as possible? So there’s huge work going on around AI and data science. We obviously work really closely with our distribution partners as well [to] make sure that we are really prominent and visible on all of those homepages. We’re really confident it’s going to continue to grow.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Top picture, L-R: Elizabeth Olsen in “Love & Death,” Vicky McClure in “Without Sin” and Helena Bonham Carter in “Nolly”
