26th Anniversary of the biggest shake up in ITV

Was the merger a direct result of ITV Digital going under, or were they already eyeing each other up anyway?

We'd still have ITV2. It launched in 1998. And probably CITV, which could've evolved from the Carlton Kids channel that was on cable. But yeah, Granada Plus may well have still existed instead of ITV3.

Carlton Kids died back in 2000, well before the merger, or the death of ITV Digital, or it even being called ITV digital.

Due to not getting Sky carriage, wasn't it? The rest of the Carlton digital channels died off too.

CITV could and probably should have launched a lot earlier than it did.

There was news reported in 1998/9 that Carlton were in advanced talks in getting their channels on Sky, but nothing ever came of it.

Carlton Cinema carried on from May 2002 to March 2003 as a Cable only service (possibly NTL only), I think at that point the writing was certainly on the wall for it. Saying that Carlton Select and CFN were cable only prior to being available by On Digital and seemed to get by ok. But both channels, more so Select really lacked quality, there’s only so much you can repeat Birds of a Feather and Lovejoy.

Part of the reason why CITV Channel was delayed was because they were initially going to venture up with Nickelodeon, but this fell apart. I believe they were going to call it ITV Nickelodeon Kids/INK. I think they also needed some clearance from GMTV before proceeding too. Considering it shows mostly repeats and only has a tiny mainstream presence it seems to do ok ratings wise.

A notable feature of the Wales and West of England region was the small differences between the size of the bids with only £2.7m between the highest and the lowest.

HTV £20.5m
Merlin £19.4m
C3WW £18.3m
C3W £17.8m

C3WW failed on quality grounds but was the ITC forced by these numbers to award the franchise to HTV, who nearly broke the bank, because the C3W bid was too close to nab HTV for overbidding?

Partly because of the ITV Digital disaster. The share prices of both ITV companies dropped sharply as a result of ITV Digital's struggling efforts. But by that time too they had also planned to remove regional identities from ITV1.



Yep. But in fact, ITV has historically struggled with most of their pay services, whether they were operated by Carlton, Granada and even ITV itself. Carlton's problems have been well documented here - no Sky carriage in particular. Granada set up a pay TV venture with Sky and by the end it transmogrified into a division responsible for running ITV's digital channels. Their own DTT platform crumbled under the spectre of Sky and overpaying for less lucrative football rights.

They still cannot shake off their struggle with their own pay TV efforts - ITV Box Office was seen as a joke by boxing fans and had widespread problems on Sky's platform in the past, and with ITV Encore being closed down next week, it's safe to say that it didn't gain much traction.

It wasn't so much that, because each bid was considered in depth independently of each other. HTV, along with Yorkshire were deemed to have an unrealistic business plan, but not so severely optimistic that it would mean they couldn't survive the 10 year franchise period.

It's on record that Tyne Tees was initially failed on business grounds, and only scraped through after a reassessment which saw it compared against all the other bids that were failed for the same reason.

Never knew that. YTV would have been pissed off.

YTV already were pissed off at Granada for involving itself in the North East TV bid (along with Border). This lead to YTV and TTTV backing Phil Redmond's North West TV, and Border living in fear of a rival bid backed by its scorned neighbours.

Fun and games methinks

I think it was probably a case of Granada positioning itself in a strong position for consolidation later on down the line. And if that was the case, then it obviously worked.