Virgin Media announced today that their digital TV customers will soon be able to access a large amount of ITV content via ITV Player, on top of the BBC iPlayer content that they already receive on demand.
The agreement will allow Virgin Media’s 3.5 million customers to view over 40 hours of programming from ITV1, 2, 3 and 4 each week. This includes popular shows such as Coronation Street and Emmerdale. The programmes will all be made available for seven days after being broadcast as part of Virgin Media’s free Catch-up TV service.
In addition Virgin Media’s viewers will be able to choose from a library of about 500 hours of ITV comedies, documentaries and dramas, to watch at any time on demand.
The deal also allows for a selection of ITV’s High Definition (HD) programming to be available on demand.
The cost of the deal is undisclosed, but is rumoured to be very lucrative for ITV and hence expensive for Virgin Media! Virgin Media is therefore putting its money where its mouth is, in terms of developing its on-demand proposition. It clearly sees a point of difference between it and Sky which it is keen to develop.
According to Virgin Media, more than half of their TV customers regularly use their on-demand service, with total views of all on demand programmes exceeding 357 million by the end of the first nine months of 2008 and averaging 45 million views each month in the third quarter of last year.
ITV has also done well out of on-demand viewing online with the average number of plays per month more than doubling since the end of the first quarter of 2008. The top three ITV shows in 2008 were Coronation Street, The X Factor and Emmerdale in that order.
However, whilst on-demand viewing is growing rapidly, it remains to be seen if on-demand viewing becomes a criteria important enough for subscribers to switch service providers. The real attraction for families still resides in premium sports and movies content which Sky excels at. We suspect that Sky will be far keener to invest in holding onto the Premiership football rights for example, than investing heavily in trying to match Virgin Media’s on-demand proposition.
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