Comcast moves for ITV to create a UK-focused streaming giant
UK commercial broadcaster ITV has confirmed it's in early-stage talks about a possible sale of its broadcasting business to Comcast, which already owns pay-TV broadcaster Sky in the UK.
The division includes ITV’s terrestrial TV channels and its streaming platform ITVX. The deal would value the business at £1.6 billion (U$2.1bn).
Sky News – itself part of any potential merger with ITV’s News operations - said “the approach centres on the potential creation of a UK-focused streaming giant.”
Sir Peter Bazalgette, former chair of ITV until September 2022 and a shareholder, told BBC Radio 4, “There's going to be an inevitable consolidation of domestic broadcasters all across Europe. There are four or five domestic broadcasts across Europe who can't all have a long-term future against the streaming giants. There is going to be a consolidation, and ITV are going to lead it in the UK.”
ITV’s largest single shareholder, Liberty Global, which jointly owns Virgin Media O2 with Spanish telecoms operator Telefónica, halved its 10 per cent stake in ITV last month.
The proposed deal does not include ITV Studios, the content arm behind drama such as Mr Bates and the Post Office and reality format Love Island.
Bazalgette said ITV’s share price doesn't reflect the value of ITV Studios and “probably discounts all of their commercial revenue from their channels and ITVX. This is one way to release some value.”
ITV and Sky along with Channel 4 are planning to pool resources into a new advertising marketplace in collaboration with Comcast in 2026. This will be based on Universal Ads, Comcast’s advertising platform, which has been “designed to make television as easy to buy as social media” and includes video generation from Streamr.AI at its core.
Alongside the AI video generator, the marketplace will also reportedly allow easy access to on-demand and streaming inventory from the three sales houses through a single campaign powered by Comcast’s FreeWheels technology.
ITV’s share price is down around 75 per cent what it was a decade ago. In other words, quality of performance hasn’t translated to commercial value. In a supremely competitive field, the world is moving away from linear TV which is where ITV still generates a lot of revenue.
“Free-to-air channels across the world are not seen as having a great amount of value,” said Bazalgette. “In fact, they throw off a massive amount of cash and still sell a lot of advertising, so they're undervalued by the marketplace and this is one way of trying to correct that.”
If ITV were to join with Sky in the UK they would hold about 70% of the TV ad marketplace, a near monopoly which would not pass normally pass the regulator. However, given the parlous stage of public service broadcast and the government’s desire to keep it running, Comcast may sense the sentiment has changed.
Bazelgette called UK competition rules “completely out of date” adding that the real market is video advertising where Google and Meta are prime competitors. Google and Meta have nine times the combined advertising revenue of Sky and ITV, so the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) needs to redefine what the advertising market is. Once they've done that I think they’ll probably say that this deal was fine.”
Media analyst Ian Whittaker, also speaking to BBC Radio, said the move was “essentially a massive dare to the UK government.”
He said, “Comcast’s pitch that the UK needs to be seen to be open to business and that a merger is the only long-term survival option given the changing structural environment.”
ITV shares rose as much as 19 per cent in morning trading on the news.
The other main UK commercial broadcasters Channel 4 and Channel 5 (styled as 5) face similar pressures to consolidate. Five is owned by Paramount Skydance, which under new ownership has begun cost-cutting in the US. Channel Four’s future has been a topic of debate for some time with repeat speculation of a merger between its digital services and BBC iPlayer.
“Channel 4’s future over 10-15 years is very uncertain, and at the very least it is going to need to find ways of collaborating with other broadcasters like sharing streaming services, or selling advertising together because its long term future is not healthy. But it is a very valuable brand so we've got to have a great deal more flexibility in the television market to preserve the value of the domestic broadcasters and the public good of the programs they make.”
He argued the UK media industry should have had a strategy for the survival of public service broadcasters in place a decade ago. “Instead, we're very late to it. [We] should credit ITV with probably triggering that reappraisal. In a way the market and the companies have done what governments haven't done.”
On Thursday, ITV warned the uncertainty surrounding the UK government’s financial plans, to be announced in a budget on 21 November, were hurting ad revenue. As a result it would “temporarily” cut £35m from its budgets.
The company also said it expected advertising revenues to fall by 9% in the key fourth-quarter advertising period in the run-up to Christmas.
In June, Comcast sold pay-TV group Sky Deutschland in Germany to RTL for an initial price of EUR150 million ($176m) with the final sum determined by RTL’s share price. The US company paid Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. U$40 billion in 2018 for the Sky operations in Italy, Germany and the UK.
ITV launched ITVX three years ago. By end of 2024 it had recorded 6 billion streams and claimed to have “outpaced all other major streaming platforms in terms of growth in viewer hours - with a 35% growth in viewer hours, ahead of iPlayer, Netflix, Disney+, Channel 4 and Amazon Prime.
Year-end 2025 figures are due in a month.
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