ITV (TV network)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  ITV launched on the 22nd of September 1955, the day Associated-Rediffusion broadcast the very first signal from London, and in doing so broke a monopoly that the BBC had held over British television since 1936. A Parliament that wanted competition had passed the Television Act 1954, which created the Independent Television Authority to award franchises and police the new industry. What followed was not a single network in any conventional sense. It was a patchwork of separately owned regional companies, each responsible for its own patch of the country, and yet each also obliged to share programmes with the rest. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a system designed around healthy plurality eventually consolidate into something approaching a single broadcaster? And what does ITV actually owe the audience that has kept watching it for seven decades?

• 2. A Country Divided Into Franchises

  ›

  The first six franchises were awarded in 1954, covering London, the Midlands and the North, with the London licence split between weekdays and weekends. The Midlands and North services came on air in February and May 1956 respectively, and by 1962 the whole country was covered by fourteen regional stations. The arrangement was more complicated than it looked. Each franchise was separately owned, which meant a viewer in Yorkshire was watching a channel run by an entirely different company from one watching in the South West.

  Franchise reviews in 1963, 1967, 1974-1980 and 1991 repeatedly reshuffled the map, replacing some operators and adjusting the boundaries of others. Only one operator across that entire history was ever declared bankrupt: WWN in 1963. Every other company that left did so because a review pushed it out.

  The Broadcasting Act 1990 introduced the change that caused the most argument. The regulator, the IBA, was replaced by the lighter-touch ITC, and franchises were now awarded through a highest-bidder auction. The results were, by the source's own account, heavily criticised. Central Independent Television paid only £2,000 for its large and lucrative Midlands region because no rival bid against it. Yorkshire Television, competing for a region of equivalent size and standing, paid £37.7 million. The arithmetic made little administrative sense, and it set the stage for the wave of consolidation that followed.

• 3. Merger and the Making of ITV plc

  ›

  By 2004, two companies, Carlton and Granada, together held all the franchises covering England, Wales, the Scottish borders and the Isle of Man. That year they merged to create ITV plc. The logic was straightforward: separate companies maintaining separate infrastructure, separate production departments and separate compliance operations were duplicating costs that a single entity could eliminate.

  The subsequent acquisitions were modest in scale. Channel Television, the franchise covering the Channel Islands, was taken over in 2011. UTV, the Northern Ireland franchise, followed in 2015. After those moves, ITV plc held thirteen of the fifteen franchises.

  The two that remained outside ITV plc's ownership covered central and northern Scotland, held by STV Group. STV's relationship with the larger company was not always smooth. In July 2009, STV removed several programmes from its schedule, including The Bill, Midsomer Murders and Lewis, citing expense. ITV plc, which had recently reorganised its schedule around The Bill, was sufficiently angered to broadcast those same programmes on ITV3 so that Scottish viewers could still reach them. By the 23rd of September that year, ITV plc was reported to be suing STV for £20 million on the grounds that dropping the shows breached network agreements. STV counter-sued for £35 million. The dispute was settled in 2011, with STV agreeing to pay ITV plc £18 million.

• 4. The Structure Behind the Screen

  ›

  ITV plc produces roughly 47 percent of the network's programming through its subsidiary ITV Studios, assembled from the production departments of all the regional companies it absorbed. The Broadcasting Act 1990 requires that at least 25 percent of ITV's total output comes from independent companies; ITV plc has stated its ambition to push its own in-house share as close to the 75 percent ceiling as possible.

  The national news contract has been held by Independent Television News, ITN, since the channel's very first broadcast in 1955. That arrangement was still in place and approved through the end of 2024. The news bulletins aired under the ITN brand until 1999, when a new network identity shifted them to the ITV News banner.

  Weather forecasting came considerably later. The ITV National Weather forecast began in 1989, using data supplied by the Met Office. Before that, each regional company had produced its own local forecast. The regional forecasts today sit inside the regional news bulletins and, in summer months, include a pollen count.

  Breakfast programming has been on air since the 1st of February 1983, originally run by the independent contractor TV-am. GMTV took over that role later and became a wholly owned subsidiary of ITV plc in November 2009. Since the 6th of January 2020, the breakfast window has run until 10am on weekdays, an extension of the earlier 9:25am cutoff.

• 5. American Imports and the Schedule Wars

  ›

  In its early years, ITV leaned heavily on American programming to fill the schedule. Westerns such as Gunsmoke and Rawhide found considerable audiences, and action and science fiction series including The Fugitive and The Twilight Zone aired across various ITV regions in the early 1960s. By the 1970s, Hawaii Five-O, Happy Days and The Brady Bunch were regular fixtures, and the lunchtime expansion of 1972 opened a slot that became home to Australian soap operas such as The Sullivans and The Young Doctors.

  In the 1980s, ITV began showing Hill Street Blues just one week after its debut on NBC in the United States. L.A. Law followed a similar path. Australian evening soap Prisoner: Cell Block H arrived after News at Ten. But as Channel 4 launched in 1982 and began competing directly for American titles, the picture grew more contested. Both Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law ultimately moved from ITV to Channel 4 before their runs ended.

  By 1996, ITV had largely pulled back from American drama in peak time. That summer it debuted Savannah in a Friday 9pm slot, and the show became the highest rated new American series of that year. ITV shifted it to late-night slots for its second season, and the momentum stalled. An attempt with The Practice in September 1997 drew nowhere near comparable numbers and was dropped after three episodes. An autumn 1998 block pairing Veronica's Closet with Dharma and Greg failed to build an audience, and by the end of that decade ITV had essentially withdrawn US comedy from the main channel.

  The last attempt to establish an American drama in primetime was the television adaptation of Lethal Weapon in 2017, which aired across all three of its seasons on ITV1.

• 6. Sports Rights Over the Decades

  ›

  ITV has broadcast every FIFA World Cup live since 1966, sharing those rights with the BBC under an arrangement in place since the 1960s. The same joint arrangement covers the UEFA European Championship and the FA Cup, with ITV and the BBC having shared FA Cup rights from 1955 to 1988, and ITV holding the live rights again from 1998 to 2001 and from 2008 to 2014.

  Horse racing arrived as a flagship commitment from the 1st of January 2017, when ITV became the exclusive free-to-air home of British horse racing, with coverage every Saturday afternoon on ITV or ITV4.

  Boxing had a long and interrupted history on the channel. ITV lost its two premier boxing contracts to Sky Sports in the mid-1990s, returned in 2005 through a deal with Frank Warren's Sports Network, and broadcast that arrangement until 2008. In 2010, ITV concluded that boxing was no longer commercially viable and stopped covering it, though a pay-per-view channel called ITV Box Office ran in the late 2010s before closing at the start of 2020.

  ITV covered Formula One for twelve seasons, from 1997 to 2008. Darts was dropped in 1988 after coverage dating back to 1972, then resumed in 2007. Snooker was dropped after the 1993 British Open and largely absent until 2014, when ITV and Barry Hearn announced a five-year deal covering two tournaments per year, including the Champion of Champions and a new event called the World Grand Prix. Every Rugby World Cup since 1991 has been broadcast live on ITV.

• 7. Identity, Criticism and What Comes Next

  ›

  Before September 1989, no single visual identity existed for ITV as a whole. Each regional company used its own name on screen, and the letters ITV appeared only on sub-brands such as ITV Schools or ITV Sport. That September, a national corporate identity was established combining regional and national branding, though the balance varied company to company. National ITV-branded continuity was not adopted uniformly across England and Wales until October 2002, and regional continuity before local programmes continued until November 2006.

  Criticism of ITV has tracked the channel's commercial pressures closely. Politicians and press observers have raised concerns since the network's launch about the tension between attracting large audiences and serving a public service remit. In the early 2000s, the proliferation of reality television formats led to accusations of deliberate dumbing down. ITV has also faced sustained criticism for cutting regional programming: the group reduced its regional news programmes from 17 in 2007 to 9 by 2009, merging several regions and removing sub-regional coverage, though some sub-regional programming was restored in 2013.

  Teletext on ITV was provided by ORACLE from 1974 until 1993, then by Teletext Ltd. until Ofcom revoked the licence on the 29th of January 2010 for failing to provide news and local non-news information.

  In November 2025, ITV confirmed it was in preliminary discussions to sell its broadcasting business to Sky for £1.6 billion, a figure that would close a chapter begun when Associated-Rediffusion first went on air seventy years earlier.