Rob Fyfe, ITV Digital’s managing director, said: "We have made a real breakthrough in the commercial market, thanks to the arrival of the ITV Sport Channel. We have now made sales to over 4,500 pubs and bars, 15 percent of the market, the vast majority of which are new to us. They recognise that our service offers live football on more nights than any other platform”.
The channel’s peak audience was 98,000 for an English Worthington Cup match between Coventry and Chelsea on October 9 and does not include audiences in pubs, regularly around the 500,000 mark.
The channel’s success contrasts starkly with the free-to-air broadcast of The Premiership, ITV’s Premier League highlights show, which has been shunted out of peak-time to 10.30pm against the backdrop of poor audience ratings.
Although ITV Sport must help the platform’s cancellation rate, customer turnover or churn stood at a massive 23.1 percent, more than twice the 10 percent cancellation rate of UK satellite giant BSkyB. Its September subscriber base improved 36 percent on last year to 1.22 million, through the addition of a higher-than-expected 82,000 customers, but lags behind BSkyB with 5.3 million.
The name change from OnDigital has not yet helped the cause as ITV Digital twice delayed its break-even point this year until 2004 or 1.7 million subscribers.
ITV Digital remains in need of further investment to combat losses for parents Carlton and Granada, who has invested more than £800million ($1.1m/B1.3m).
Potential investors in its parents, such as RTL, Europe's largest television broadcaster and major shareholder in the UK’s Channel Five, have expressed interest in taking a stake but have shelved plans to do so until they have shed the burden of ITV Digital.
Under extreme pressure from the global economic downturn and the slowdown in advertising, Carlton and Granada’s options are seemingly either to locate a third investor, be it a rival platform or otherwise, restructure the business as a content provider, or close the business through the selling of its subscribers to its rivals.
Whichever it chooses, digital terrestrial TV in the UK, and indeed in Europe, is watching with baited breath.
