ITV Digital

Can anyone remember the answer to this question?

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Thank you for your article "ITV Digital Spurn Grimsby!" published on 29th June 2001. It has been very useful for me in researching matches televised by ITV Sport, especially when considering certain match broadcasts have been lost to time (not even being available on YouTube).

I see that you posted a list of scheduled ITV Digital games from August to October 2001. Do you know of any other televised ITV Sport matches post-October 2001? Or at the very least, were any Grimsby Town matches screened prior to ITV Digital's collapse? Seeing as both Rushden & Diamonds and Swindon Town both got one home game televised each, I would find it hard to believe Grimsby Town were snubbed for the entire season.

I’m fairly sure two games in the 2001/02 season were broadcast on a PPV basis on ITV Digital. A 3-1 win against Birmingham in October and a 1-1 draw with recently deceased Cedric Roussel’s Wolves in December.

Both games were on a Friday night and both yielded embarrassingly low, double digit PPV audiences, mainly due to the fee of about £12 which was silly money for second tier football over twenty years ago.

It was clear then that the model would fail; it was perhaps less clear that ITV would be prepared to find a legal loophole to renege on their financial commitments to the football league and do untold damage to club’s like Town. I think we were the worst hit in terms of pound for pound damage.

I got itv digital for my bar in Liverpool Street and, tbh it was a shambles of a service from the start.the service was very hit and miss at times and anytime one of the big games was on, it would  be a nightmare trying to get a decent signal.

The only overriding bonus was that I got tickets to a few champions league games for free and other bits and bobs (namely one of those monkeys now on pgtips ad’s, that’s worth a few Bob!)

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)

Quoted from Poojah

I’m fairly sure two games in the 2001/02 season were broadcast on a PPV basis on ITV Digital. A 3-1 win against Birmingham in October and a 1-1 draw with recently deceased Cedric Roussel’s Wolves in December.

Both games were on a Friday night and both yielded embarrassingly low, double digit PPV audiences, mainly due to the fee of about £12 which was silly money for second tier football over twenty years ago.

It was clear then that the model would fail; it was perhaps less clear that ITV would be prepared to find a legal loophole to renege on their financial commitments to the football league and do untold damage to club’s like Town. I think we were the worst hit in terms of pound for pound damage.

Were we worst hit because of the inept strategy implemented by Fenty though? What is mind boggling is the vast majority of fans, with only small snippets of information and no social media to share stuff, recognised the ITV digital thing was a farce and would fail miserably…

The people involved in clubs, who had all the information didn’t. An even bigger example of greed than the implementation of the premier league…

Don't think Fenty was involved..Huxford spent all the promised money before it arrived..it never arrived..we was left with players on ridiculous contracts we could never afford so the club decided to not pay the tax man.

Quoted from Sigone

Don't think Fenty was involved..Huxford spent all the promised money before it arrived..it never arrived..we was left with players on ridiculous contracts we could never afford so the club decided to not pay the tax man.

Oh I know that, but his strategy from that point was hardly a success…

Quoted from aldi_01

Were we worst hit because of the inept strategy implemented by Fenty though? What is mind boggling is the vast majority of fans, with only small snippets of information and no social media to share stuff, recognised the ITV digital thing was a farce and would fail miserably…

The people involved in clubs, who had all the information didn’t. An even bigger example of greed than the implementation of the premier league…

Tbf in the early days our former primary funder did a decent firefighting job after being left with a mess , it was once the ship was stabilised and the opportunity for improvement came where he came unstuck  for about 15 years .

Quoted from Sigone

Don't think Fenty was involved..Huxford spent all the promised money before it arrived..it never arrived..we was left with players on ridiculous contracts we could never afford so the club decided to not pay the tax man.

Bit of rewriting history there.

We made £1.4m profit in the 2001/02 season. That included a £1.1m of a £1.65m advance from ITV digitial at the start of their deal which would have been split evenly across 3 accounting periods had the deal not collapsed with ITV digital. Even without that we made a decent profit that season.

There was a loss posted in the 2000/01 season, but that's not unreasonable as it secured another season of Tier 2 football and the riches of the new ITV Digital deal and the £1.1m advance for DIvision One clubs. Our turnover increased around 110% on the previous season (around 80% without the £1.1m).

Sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate.

The issues we suffered from ITV digital collapsing were related to wages. It's not unreasonable to have players on multi-year contracts. ITV Digital collapsing destroyed our turnover. The contracts that saw us make a good profit in 2001/02 weren't sustainable with our turnover going down from £6.3m (£5.2m without the advance) to £3.8m overnight.

Had ITV digital not collapsed and we had stayed in D1 for another 2 season's with that deal in place we were on course for our historic accounting losses to be nearly wiped out.

Definitely remember ITV using their PPV outlet for the Football League games at some point.

Reason for such is I can remember one game drawing such incredibly low buy-rates that one newspaper ran a feature that it would have been cheaper for ITV Digital to taxi every single one of the buyers to the game, buy them a ticket and then taxi them back than buy the rights for the game and produce it.

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.