ITV Hub hits 500 million hours viewed in 2019

UK commercial broadcaster ITV has seen viewing hours on its ITV Hub catch-up service grow by 13% over the past 12 months, taking video consumption to more than 500 million hours in 2019.

The broadcaster partly attributed this success to ITV Hub’s ubiquity, with the streamer being available on 28 different platforms. Unsurprisingly, hit reality show Love Island proved to be the most popular show on ITV Hub, with its July final attracting 1.9 million simulcast requests on the service.

Soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale also feature in the top five, along with other reality favourites I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and The Only Way is Essex are also present.

ITV’s coverage of the 2019 Rugby World Cup rounds out the top five, with the ITV Hub contributing to the competition’s final between England and South Africa becoming the most watched TV moment of the year in the UK. ITV said that 12.8 million viewers tuned in across both DTT and OTT.

Steve Forde, director of digital products at ITV, said: “Reaching this figure demonstrates that not only do viewers love both the Hub’s content and using the service, but that it has evolved to seamlessly allow mass surges in viewing on simulcast and on-demand and in doing so has established itself as one of the biggest video on demand platforms in the UK.”

It is the latest success story for the ITV Hub, following the news that it surpassed 30 million registered users two years ahead of schedule. The PSB initially launched a strategy in 2021 to increase registered users from 25 million to 30 million by 2021. Again, Love Island was a significant contributing factor, with 3.2 million users signing up in June alone.

Despite this positive news, there was mass outrage from viewers as the service crashed for five minutes prior to the premiere of Love Island’s inaugural winter edition.

In response, ITV disabled log in for the duration of the show and publicly apologised for the disruption on Twitter. A similar crash happened during another episode of Love Island in July.