ITV Hub to replace ITV Player and ITV.com

Later this year, ITV will consolidate its digital services under one service known as ‘ITV Hub’. This will bring together its catch-up service ITV Player and its show websites and live services from ITV.com. The move seemingly makes sense, as ITV claims 30 per cent of its usage on PC and mobile is from live streaming ITV’s channels, which include ITV, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, CITV and ITVBe, rather than the on-demand catch-up service through ITV Player. With television viewing increasingly happening ‘off-television’, it’s unsurprising that many people are using other devices to watch live television. ITV also showed off new branding for ITV Hub that uses the different coloured dots from the various ITV channel logos and shows how ITV Hub is at the centre of all of ITV’s content.

New episodes of the Seth MacFarlane shows Family Guy and American Dad will also be coming to ITV Hub, which is quite the coup as it’s the first time the show has been offered on a public service broadcaster on-demand service.

Rufus Radcliffe, ITV’s Group Marketing Director, said:  “We have created an exciting new brand identity for The ITV Hub which will present all of ITV’s family of channels and services front and centre with a distinct, digital look and feel building off the success of ITV’s rebrand.  We are looking forward to fully unveiling it later this autumn.”

ITV Hub wil be coming to PC, internet connected TVs and mobile, as well as Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick in addition to the upcoming Freeview Play service. Freeview Play set-top boxes are expected to launch from Humax imminently and come to many Panasonic Viera televisions as an over-the-air upgrade. If your television is branded as having ‘Freeview Play inside’ you’ll get an on-screen alert to download a firmware upgrade. Panasonic will also launch Blu Ray recorders and digital recorders that will support Freeview Play.