UTV rebrand

Sure. So long as we can have Fat Les in the idents.

A bit of an irony, all this talk about nationalism (no capital letter) in a thread about the ITV station in Northern Ireland.

Particularly considering the picture postcards of the region - which gave the old UTV presentation package a flavour of local identity - have been scrapped. (Are we back on track now?)

How long before the UTV brand itself is scrapped? 18 months? Two years?

I placed my bet for Christmas this year on this thread a few pages back.

Whenever the new industrial park building comes on line 2018 is the absolute latest for the scraping of the brand I would say.

An unintentional mis-spelling which accurately reflects what's happened.

Could the high viewing figures for UTV Live have any connection with Northern Ireland being a UK region with a lower than average proportion of households with an internet connection?

A former resident of Northern Ireland informed me not so long ago that it’s still quite normal for children and teenagers in Northern Ireland to not have an internet connection, or even a computer or tablet, at home, especially in more rural areas.



You make a valid point. In the 1970s and 80s UTV functioned to show the local news about the aftermath of IRA bombings and the political conflict then it switched over to a networked programme from the mainland, with only an occasional appearance of a locally made programme. From the early 1970s to the late 1990s Northern Ireland was a very newsworthy corner of the UK. I have thought that UTV was semi-protected at both the 1980 and 1991 franchise auctions because of the sterling service that it provided in reporting news with its cameramen having to sometimes risk their lives to gather footage in ways that few cameramen from other ITV companies had to endure.

I would have to assume this former Northern Ireland Resident is pulling your leg. 9 out of every 10 people have an Internet connection to the home in NI, plus every Man, Woman and Child under the age of 50 seem to have at least one Smartphone. Having said that it would be worrying that Children that didn't have internet access would choose to watch UTV Live...

Just heard the male NI announcer today on the network, he's quite good!
https://clyp.it/n5s0ezr0

That could easily have gone out on UTV as it doesn't mention the channel name.

I think during the day it should be this type of CA, with no menetion of ITV or UTV.

Well I live in Northern Ireland and yes there are a lot of areas that can't get Internet. Not even a mobile phone signal! It's mainly rural areas affected.

As shocking as this seems... it's 100% true. Northern Ireland is just an afterthought sadly.

Northern Ireland is not a place that I'm familiar with at all. Neither is UTV. Therefore I'm taking the words of the former resident of Northern Ireland with good faith. She lived in the Strabane area, close to the border with Donegal, and left in 2013, so there could have been changes in the meantime regarding internet uptake at homes in Northern Ireland.

Nobody said anything about children – with or without internet access – watching UTV Live, but as a general rule of thumb, households with school aged children and teenagers throughout Britain are more likely to have the internet at home than households with over 50s and no children in order to support education and school work.

I have encountered a few fragments of information elsewhere that a higher proportion of people in Northern Ireland now access the internet using a smartphone rather than a computer than people on the mainland do. Could this be the result of computers at home being less popular in Northern Ireland than on the mainland over the past 10 or so years? The former resident of Northern Ireland told me how her children's classmates at school all had a TV at home, and many had a game console, but probably around half of them didn't have a computer or a tablet. A fair few of them only had analogue TVs at home until less than a year before the analogue switch off in October 2012.