Oh ITV - why art thou so pathetic?

Headline on ITV Evening News tonight ( which I do not watch by the way, I just heard the headlines ) - Michael Barrymore interview on ITV1 tonight.

Yes. Shamelessly plugging a programme on ITV1 on the news programme, which really sums up ITV. OK, so it was a news story, but we've already had his brief reaction and now this story is just current affairs, hence it's featuring on the Tonight programme. It's just like BBC News having as their headline 'the war will be debated on Question Time tonight'.

ITV Digital - as a Sky subscriber we need ITV Digital to succeed (i.e. not go bump). But they've (in my opinion) go it so wrong. I see it like this. They've spent all this money on advertising the fact that they have 'more football than Sky'. However, in a family, this may stereotypically appeal to the father, who mentions it to the mother, who says 'I don't just want to watch football, what else is available?' - so they end up going for Sky. ITV should advertise the fact that ITV Digital has UK Gold, Paramount, Sky One, MTV, Discovery etc. - I reckon that the majority of people will want more than football!

I know what you mean, but you have to bear in mind that ITV is in a cutthroat arena these days, and this is nothing worse than what Sky do from time to time, and certainly no different to American/Aussie/European channels. It's an unfortunate fact of life in modern broadcasting

When do you think ITV did start going down hill?
When they started putting four advert breaks into 1 hour ptogrammes. When they started putting trailers in every ad break. When OgDigital was finally renamed ITVDigital. Whats ever next.

ITV turned nasty the minute they changed their logo and tried to 're-invent' themselves. It had so much potential, but was done in completely the wrong way. A relaunch turned into nothing much in particular.

They need to re-invent themselves right now.

In fact, I could write a book on what is wrong with ITV, and what they can do to sort it out. I am very tempted.......

ITV desperately need to play to their key strengths -- their place as the entertainment channel (ie clear stranding of programming which was attempted but has kind of fallen apart), regionality (they need to allow the regions to employ local imagery in the branding, but within a strict framework so as to strengthen the central brand -- making 3500 idents centrally is asking for trouble) and start taking more risks.

Basically they need to start looking at the BBC rather than ABC US which adopts a similar nasty branding system and is in similar dire straits...

I will ALWAYS blame Margaret Thatcher for the downfall of ITV.

I completely agree with the fact that ITV needs a strict standard for presentation amongst the regions. The only problem is to get the regions to agree!

ITV needs a strong corporate image - something it is attempting to find, but is dismally failing at doing so

Has anyone also noticed how the newscaster announces at the end of a bullitin what the next program is. They say 'next on ITV1'. I bet UTV and SMG like that

Another problem for ITV is the regional programming, it just dosen't fit in what ITV are trying to be.

I'm sure there is a headline for Panorama in the Sunday Ten O'Clock News on BBC One now.... not part of the news is it...!

I know exactly what you mean, i'm often very tempted to do the same, but the way ITV are going at the moment half of the problems won't exist by the time your finished. There are two ways to interpret that, ITV may not be around in the year 2050 when you finish/or ITV Digital will probably fold soon!

Thats true, and they do mention Newsnight at 1035 on BBC 1 but they are all headline news related. Simply changing your headlines from an important war/Tony martin case/ Blair speech story to Barrymore is not right and quite pathetic for the sake of a few hundred thousand viewers.