If you wanted a single date to mark the end of the era of British broadcasting that began in a Croydon transmitter hall in 1955, the first week of July 2026 would do.
That was when Sky, the pay television company owned by the US giant Comcast, agreed to buy ITV’s broadcasting business, its channels, its ITVX streaming service and the advertising operation that funds them, for up to £1.6 billion. The company that viewers on these islands have known as ITV for seven decades will, subject to regulatory approval, become a subsidiary of its old satellite rival. ITV plc, meanwhile, will cease to be a broadcaster.
It can be hard to keep track of the whirlwind of mergers and acquisitions going on in international media. A week before the ITV announcement, Comcast said it would split itself in two, spinning off NBCUniversal and Sky into a stand-alone media company while keeping its US broadband and wireless businesses under the Comcast name. That followed an earlier spin-off of its declining cable channels, including CNBC and MSNBC, into a separate entity. So the eventual owner of ITV’s channels will be an NBCUniversal-Sky combination whose own strategic future is widely assumed to involve further deals.
What is left behind is ITV Studios, the production arm, which becomes an independent publicly listed company with more than £2 billion in annual revenue, a library of global formats and, as a sweetener thrown into the transaction, Love Productions, maker of The Great British Bake Off.
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Sky has committed to spending at least £2.1 billion on ITV Studios programming between 2028 and 2032, which keeps Coronation Street, Emmerdale and Love Island where audiences expect to find them. But nobody in the industry expects Studios to remain independent for long. The recent merger of Banijay and All3Media created a production behemoth spanning everything from MasterChef to Black Mirror, and Banijay’s chief executive François Riahi has been candid about the logic now driving the sector. “Consolidation is the name of the game,” he said.
The strategy behind all this frantic activity is obvious. Advertiser-funded linear television, the model on which ITV was built, no longer generates enough money to compete with Netflix, Amazon, Disney and, above all, YouTube.
What ITV still has is reach. Its channels are watched by about 40 million people in Britain every week, and ITVX has 16.5 million monthly users. Bolted on to Sky, the combined business would account for roughly a fifth of all in-home viewing in the UK, second only to the BBC, with a single advertising sales house spanning free-to-air, pay TV and streaming.
For ITV’s shareholders, selling the declining asset while keeping the growing one makes sense. But there is something poignant about it all the same. ITV’s arrival in 1955 broke the BBC’s monopoly and changed British, and Irish, popular culture. It gave the world Coronation Street, World in Action, The South Bank Show and Brideshead Revisited. Its federal structure of regional companies, including UTV in the North from 1959, embedded commercial television in the civic life of these islands in ways that no streaming service will ever replicate. That a company with this history should end up as a line item in the restructuring of a Philadelphia cable operator tells you everything you need to know about where power now lies in the audiovisual industry.
Another media and cable group, Liberty Global, chaired by American dealmaker John Malone, was until recently ITV’s largest shareholder, having built a stake of about 10 per cent from 2014 onwards. For years it was assumed that Malone might eventually move for ITV outright. Liberty was never a disinterested investor. Through Virgin Media O2, its UK joint venture with Telefónica, it is Sky’s principal rival in British pay television and broadband, and an ITV takeover would have been a formidable counter to Comcast’s position in the market.
Instead, as the Sky talks took shape, Liberty sold down in stages, halving its holding last October and cutting it to under 3 per cent by the spring, exiting at a share price so far below what it paid a decade ago that only hedging arrangements spared it a heavy loss. The outcome is that Liberty’s biggest UK competitor now takes ownership of the country’s biggest commercial broadcaster.
Liberty also owns Virgin Media Ireland, and with it Virgin Media Television, this country’s only commercial free-to-air broadcaster. The relationship between that broadcaster and ITV is as old as the station itself. ITV was part of the original TV3 consortium, and when Granada took a 45 per cent stake in 2000 it brought the ITV schedule with it, moving Coronation Street and Emmerdale from RTÉ to TV3 in January 2001. A quarter of a century later, the soaps, Love Island and other ITV shows remain the spine of Virgin Media One and Two.
For Virgin Media Television, therefore, the implications could be existential. Its most important programming will now be supplied from within the corporate family of Sky, a direct competitor on both sides of the Irish Sea. Whether the Irish rights to the soaps survive on their current terms when the contracts next come up is an open question, and one where Virgin holds little leverage. And for anyone who argues that RTÉ should simply be left to the market, the entire story offers a useful corrective. The only viable market alternatives to public funding are being wound down or devoured by a global conglomerate.
