ITV, the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, has published its 2019 financial results which show strong growth across a range of the company’s activities. 

  • Content production revenues (via ITV Studios) rose 9% to £1.8bn YOY
  • Long form online viewing broke 500m hours served for the first time (506m compared to 447m in 2018) accompanied by a 6% increase in dwell time and 28% increase in monthly active users
  • ITV Hub registered user accounts were up to 30.8m (vs. 27.6m the year before)
  • Online advertising grew 21%
  • And whilst linear ad income declined by 2% (to £2.1bn), overall ITV group external revenue increased 3% to £3.3bn

For ITV Studios, the broadcaster said that original hours commissioned by OTT platforms was up 95%, 58% of Studios revenue was generated outside the UK, up from 56% in 2018, and ITV Studios delivered 37% of ITV plc’s adjusted EBITA.

ITV’s OTT service, Hub+, has over 400,000 subscribers which is up over 50% year-on-year, BritBox US has over one million subscribers and BritBox Australia will launch later in 2020. BritBox UK venture losses were £21 million in 2019 and ITV expects the venture losses to be around £55 million to £60 million in 2020, broadly equivalent to its net investment.

You can see ITV’s full financial statement here

 

ABOUT KAUSER KANJI

Kauser Kanji has been working in online video for 19 years, formerly at Virgin Media, ITN and NBC Universal, and founded VOD Professional in 2011. He has since completed major OTT projects for, amongst others, A+E Networks, the BBC, BBC Studios, Channel 4, DR (Denmark), Liberty Global, Netflix, Sony Pictures, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation and UKTV. He now writes industry analyses, hosts an online debate show, OTT Question Time, as well as its in-person sister event, OTT Question Time Live

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