ITV and Sky agree new and improved long-term commercial partnership
ITV and Sky agree new and improved long-term commercial partnership
ITV and Sky have signed an innovative new long-term partnership that drives increased value for both businesses and provides Sky TV customers with an enhanced viewing experience across all of ITV’s content and services.
The partnership, which builds on the previous advertising and carriage agreement between the companies, covers all existing and future Sky products and provides new opportunities to collaborate and innovate. This includes enabling ITV to launch addressable advertising on Sky platforms across both VoD and linear viewing building on Sky, ITV and Channel 4 uniting behind Cflight. The initially Sky-developed, ground-breaking TV measurement tool provides advertisers with a clear understanding of a campaign’s full reach and frequency across all three broadcasters.
The new agreement will bring the full ITV content experience to viewers TVs, with deep integration into Sky’s world-leading product innovation. The current integrated ITV Hub service on Sky+ and Sky Q will be supplemented with the launch of the ITV Hub app on Sky Q during 2022. This will provide Sky Q customers with more choice and flexibility, including the option to watch all of ITV’s available programmes within the ITV Hub user interface. The ITV Hub currently has over 34 million registered users and c.452,000 Hub+ subscribers.
For advertisers, the evolution of ITV Hub on Sky brings increased opportunities to advertise through Planet V, ITV’s innovative programmatic addressable advertising platform. Planet V allows both advertisers and agencies control over the planning, purchasing and reporting of their campaigns on ITV Hub, building audiences with ITV’s first party data and augmenting those audiences with advertisers’ own data.
The addition of ITV content from Sky’s platform estate will significantly increase Planet V’s addressable inventory pool, offering advertisers additional targeting options and increased campaign reach.
Carolyn McCall, CEO of ITV, said: “We welcome the way Sky has continued to improve its product offering because viewers and commercial customers are at the centre of what we do as a business. This new and enhanced agreement to extend our relationship with Sky benefits both groups.
“This exciting new commercial partnership brings many advantages for our advertisers and delivers on our objective of building a scale AVoD proposition across the UK market and ensures ITV’s ability to deliver addressable advertising at scale on ITV Hub with Planet V.
“For ITV’s viewers, the partnership ensures that they have easy and widespread access to our breadth of programmes, ensuring that they can view ITV’s content in the most convenient and appropriate way to them.”
Stephen van Rooyen, Executive VP & Chief Executive, UK & Europe at Sky said: “ITV have been a longstanding partner to Sky and we are pleased to be deepening and extending our relationship. The great content provided by ITV will sit together with all the apps and content our customers love, and the ever-expanding slate of award-winning Sky Originals, all in one place on Sky Q.”
For further information:
Laura Wootton, Head of Press, Commercial and Online, Corporate Communications, ITV plc
Laura.Wootton@itv.com
Jessica Bihari, Senior Corporate Communications Manager, Sky
jessica.bihari@sky.uk
About Sky
Sky is Europe’s leading media and entertainment company and is proud to be part of the Comcast group. Across six countries, we connect our 23.4 million customers to the best entertainment, sports, news, and arts including our own award-winning original content.
Our technology, including the market leading Sky Q, connects people to everything they love – with entertainment from Sky TV, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and BBC iPlayer, and apps like Spotify, YouTube, BBC Sounds, Highbrow, Peloton, Fiit, and more, in one place, easy. Our streaming service NOW brings viewers all the enjoyment of Sky with the flexibility of a contract-free service. Through our new B2B broadband provider, Sky Connect, we offer superfast broadband with business-grade 4G back-up to small businesses in the UK.
Building on the success of Sky Originals like Chernobyl, Gangs of London and Brassic, we are doubling our investment in original content by 2024 through Sky Studios. Sky News provides impartial and trustworthy journalism for free, Sky Arts is the UK’s only dedicated free-to-air arts channel making the arts accessible for everyone and Sky Sports, our leading sports broadcasting service, brings customers some of the biggest and best global sporting events from the Premier League to Formula 1 and everything in-between. Our new TV and movie studio, Sky Studios Elstree, which will open in 2022, is expected to create over 2,000 new jobs and generate an additional £3 billion of production investment in the UK over the first five years.
We believe that we can be a force for good in the communities in which we operate. We’re committed to being Europe’s first net zero carbon entertainment company by 2030 and we’re proud to be a Principal Partner and Media Partner of COP26. We take pride in our approach to diversity and inclusion: we’ve been recognised by The Times and Stonewall for our commitment to diversity and we’ve set ambitious 2025 targets to continue to increase diversity and representation. We’re also committed to investing £30million across our markets over three years to improve our approach to diversity and inclusion, and to tackle racial injustice.
About ITV
ITV entertains millions of people and shapes culture. We are a leading media and entertainment company, with the largest free-to-air commercial television network in the UK and a global production and distribution business, with over 55 labels. Creativity, quality content and engaging audiences in the UK and around the world, is at the core of everything we do.
We reach over 40 million viewers every week with our programmes on ITV's family of channels, as well as the ITV Hub, which has over 34 million registered users.
ITV Studios produced 8,400 hours of original programming last year. Our global footprint spans 13 countries including the UK, US, Australia, France, Germany, The Nordics, Italy and the Netherlands and our global distribution business sells our catalogue of 45,000+ hours to more than 300 broadcasters and platforms.
ITV has several SVOD services, including BritBox UK, BritBox International which is available in the US, Canada and Australia, and ITV Hub+ (the ad-free version of the ITV Hub with download functionality).
BritBox UK has the largest collection of British box sets and is controlled and managed by ITV, with the BBC as a strategic and equity partner, Channel 4 and Channel 5 as content partners, and EE and BT as distribution partners.
The international BritBox SVOD service is a joint venture with the BBC and provides local audiences with an unrivalled collection of British box sets and original series all in one place.
