ITV Digital

Quoted from GollyGTFC

ITV Sport was a monthly subscription channel. It wasn't a PPV service although they had a sister channel that showed Sky Sports Premier League matches on that basis. ITV Sport was only available through ITV digital and the NTL cable network. It wasn't available through Telewest (the other major cable network that merged to form what is now Virgin Media) or Sky.

As well as the Football League matches shown on the ITV Sport Channel there were matches shown on the regional main ITV channel.

We were live 5 times in the 2001/02 season. 3 tmes on ITV Sport & twice on regional ITV Channels...

Fri 26 Oct - Grimsby Town 3-1 Birmingham City (ITV Sport Channel)
Fri 23 Nov - Burnley 1-0 Grimsby Town (ITV Sport Channel)
Fri 7 Dec - Grimsby Town 1-1 Wolverhampton Wanderers (ITV Sport Channel)
Sun 10 Feb - Watford 2-0 Grimsby Town (ITV London & Yorkshire regions)
Sun 21 Apr - Millwall 3-1 Grimsby Town (ITV London only)

There was a PPV component to ITV Digital. So convinced was I of that fact I googled it and what should pop-up but a 22 year old Q&A published by our very own Rob Sedgwick.

https://thefishy.co.uk/story.php?id=8154826

The information, provided directly by ITV states:

Quoted Text

I've heard there are pay-per-view games, where do I get them and how much do they cost?

ITV Digital are showing 40 FA Barclaycard Premiership pay-per-view games and 20 Nationwide pay-per-view games through ITV Sport Select, our sports pay-per-view service. If you watch the ITV Sport Channel you get all 60 of these games for only £3.00 per month. That works out at 50p a game. The pay-per-view games are also available on a match by match basis.

In effect, you could watch individual PPV games or pay an additional £3 per month, on top of your ITV Sport subscription, to watch them all. It was an experimental revenue mechanic that was always doomed to fail, well, because it was stupid.

Most stupid of all though were the fundamentals of the commercial deal itself, as touched on by others. ITV agreed to pay £105m per season which, adjusted for inflation, equates to £187m today - precisely what Sky has just agreed to pay for its latest EFL package in 2023 (whether that is a pure coincidence or something more significant, I honestly don’t know).

For that, Sky get almost wall-to-wall coverage of the EFL, broadcast on its own platform which despite the rise of Netflix et al, remains by far the largest TV subscription service in the UK by revenue, and has the largest domestic sports audience in Europe.

ITV Digital put themselves on the hook for a monumental amount of money all things considered, without the platform to get even close to recouping it. Their failure to broadcast via Sky, who had something like a 70% market share of satellite / cable TV at the time, was terminal. Whether the move was based on the idea that Sky’s stance would soften or not I don’t know, but it never did, and without them on board the whole concept of ITV Digital / Sport was always doomed to fail. That much seems obvious, with or without the benefit of hindsight.

Town were without doubt hit hardest by the inevitable fallout than any other club, for the pure and simple reason that the money that was not forthcoming represented a greater proportion of overall turnover than for any other club. In the 2002/03 season, when the whole thing went pop, only Wimbledon had lower attendances than us in the second tier, and they were of course by this point a basket case on their way to Milton Keynes, where those losses would be covered by tossers Winkleman and Co.

The club’s handling thereafter can be debated, but my recollection is that we ended up owing a lot of money to HMRC which would have made the admin route, popular with many clubs at the time, particularly risky.

Regardless, it feels like, over 20 years on, we are just about on the road to recovery.