ITVX aims to convert up to 23m casual viewers

Viewers who have a light relationship with ITV’s linear and Hub offerings are a prime target for conversion to ITVX, according to the broadcaster’s chief product officer Deep Bagchee.

Speaking this weekend, Bagchee dubbed this 23 million-strong demographic as “main streamers”, defined as having “some relationship” with ITV and heavy VoD usage.

He broke down the demographic into four categories, based on viewers’ behaviour: ‘savvy streamers’ who are focused on quality rather than quantity, ‘armchair explorers’ who are slower to adopt technologies but who enjoy UK-first content and sports, ‘the socialisers’ for whom VOD is a primary destination and they’re seeking out reality and entertainment and ‘everyday eventers’ who prefer entertainment to drama and who love tentpole shows.

ITV will establish how to cater to these different viewer interests by using data from its 35 million registered accounts.

The second largest addressable market for the streaming platform are loyal linear viewers of ITV who can be nudged onto ITVX, comprising 13.5m potential users, while the smallest addressable market is made up of 2.2m who can be won over with a differentiated content offering.

“As we bring in new audiences, we’ll learn about them and they will get added to the mix,” Baghee said.

The chief product officer also expounded upon the 20 FAST channels that will be housed on ITVX, stating that they provide the curation of an SVoD with the ease-of-use of an EPG.

“There is a bit of exhaustion with rails, home pages and manual content discovery for some people, They just wanted the EPG guide – to turn on the TV on and find something to watch,” he explained.

“FAST channels provides that mechanic to give someone a channel, the genre or a show that they are extremely interested in and allows us to monetise that as well.”