Something New from ITV News

One of the great things about our regular Broadcast Revolution events is the chance to have a long background chat with our guests before we go “on-air”. Our latest event focused on the use of celebrities as spokespeople-- it’s well worth a watch via our website right now! One of our guests that day was Tim Forrest who’s Content Editor at ITV News. He’s currently working on an exciting new project to bring a major new platform to ITV News.

ITVX launched late last year. It’s the latest version of what used to be called the ITV Hub or ITV Player. It’s a streaming service and that’s the way a lot of us watch our TV these days. The great thing with a streaming service is it gives you a new outlet to place news coverage. We learned this in another of our events where I spoke with Rachel Fursman from the BBC News Channel . She told us that the BBC often puts separate elements of its news coverage on the News Channel, the BBC iPlayer and also on the BBC News website. And that’s what ITV News is going to do now too.

Already on ITVX you can see longer, more in-depth reports from ITV’s bulletins, the ITV News website and ITV News social pages. But soon there’ll be the additional capacity to put rolling news on ITVX. So the next big news event can be covered hour after hour.

Of course, the likes of the BBC News Channel and Sky News do this already. But ITV pulled out of having its own news channel (the ITV News Channel) way back in 2005. Now ITV News will soon have that extra capacity once again to roll with big, breaking news when it wants. But when there’s not much going on, they can shut down until the next really big story breaks. 

It’s an exciting new development and it means more opportunities to get on-air when there’s big news happening. We’ll keep you posted on when this new service from ITV News gets fully up and running.

Words by Mike Young