ITV & Sky agree new & 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.”