ITVX passes 3.6 billion streams in 10 months, and Sky is buying the habit behind it

ITVX has broken its own annual streaming record with two months of the year still to run, and ITV is presenting the figure as proof that Britain’s main commercial broadcaster has finally become a streamer. The record is real. What it shows, though, is less a new kind of television than the oldest ITV habits moving online: soaps, a reality house, a football tournament and a wall of archive channels.

That distinction matters more than usual this autumn. The service that set the record is being sold. Sky has agreed to buy ITV’s channels and ITVX, and the British government has just ordered regulators to look at the deal, including a new test of what it means for on-demand viewing. MCM’s reading is simple: Sky is not paying for a British Netflix. It is paying for a national habit that now runs through an app, and the streaming record is the clearest price tag that habit has ever had.

For viewers, the question is practical. If ITVX is where Coronation Street, Big Brother and the next big ITV drama now live, then who owns it, and what they are required to keep on it, decides what a large part of the country watches for free.

What ITVX’s 3.6 billion streams record actually counts

According to ITV’s figures, reported by TVBEurope and Telecompaper, ITVX reached 3.6 billion streams on Friday 30 October 2026, beating its full-year total for 2025 in ten months. October alone brought 358 million streams, up 33 per cent on the same month last year. ITV called it the best October in the service’s history, and Telecompaper noted it was the biggest year-on-year rise of 2026 outside the World Cup months.

The breakdown is where the story sits. TVBEurope reports that Big Brother took the top spot, reaching 53 million streams, more than 30 million of them in October alone. Drama delivered 112 million streams in the month, up 37 per cent, the fourth month this year in which the genre passed 100 million. Soaps came second among genres, up 38 per cent to 61 million streams.

Then there are the FAST channels, the free, ad-supported linear feeds that run inside the app. ITV says it has expanded the line-up to more than 20 in the past month, including a dedicated film channel and back-to-back runs of archive programmes. Viewing of those channels is up 31 per cent year on year, and the newly launched Classic Corrie channel, old episodes of Coronation Street played one after another, is already the service’s fifth most watched channel.

Read those numbers together and a pattern appears. The engine of ITVX’s best year is a long-running reality format, two soaps that have been on air for decades, and a channel of repeats. The newest thing about them is the screen they are watched on.

Big Brother, Coronation Street and the World Cup: old ITV habits, new screen

None of this is new to ITV’s own reporting. When the service passed its 2024 total a month early last year, Advanced Television reported that Coronation Street and Emmerdale had drawn nearly 500 million streams between them, up 30 per cent, and that Love Island and The Only Way Is Essex had attracted just under 400 million. I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! reached 95 million streams that season. Drama, helped by what ITV calls Drama Drop Sundays, a new boxset every week, accounted for 917 million.

This year added the strongest accelerant broadcast television has: a men’s football World Cup. ITV’s half-year results, covered by Advanced Television, credited the tournament with significantly boosting engagement, and ITVX recorded its best-ever first half of the year for viewing, up 27 per cent. Chief executive Carolyn McCall said then that ITVX was delivering “double-digit growth in both viewing and digital advertising revenues.”

There is nothing embarrassing about any of this. Soaps and reality shows are exactly what a mass-market broadcaster is supposed to be good at, and moving that audience from the schedule to the app without losing it is hard. The point is narrower. ITVX’s growth is the migration of an existing audience, not the conquest of a new one, and that shapes both what Sky is buying and what regulators should be asking.

The case that ITVX is a real streamer, not a catch-up app

The strongest counter-argument comes from ITV itself, and it deserves to be stated in full. On this view, ITVX has done what most broadcasters’ streaming services have failed to do. Kevin Lygo, ITV’s managing director of media and entertainment, has called it “the dominant commercial BVoD streaming service in the UK”, and TVBEurope reported ITV’s figure that ITVX viewing has grown at a compound rate of 25 per cent since launch, ahead of the 16 per cent managed by the commercial broadcaster streaming market combined. Drama boxsets dropped weekly are a streaming strategy, not a broadcast one. Younger viewers are arriving: ITV says last year’s I’m A Celebrity launch drew 2.7 million viewers aged 16 to 34. And a soap watched on demand, on a phone, by someone who never sits in front of the evening schedule is a genuinely new kind of viewer, whatever the age of the programme.

On that reading, calling the record “old ITV” misses the achievement. Every streamer is built on a library and a few habit-forming formats. ITVX simply owns its own.

That case is right about the execution and wrong about the conclusion. The library is the point, and it is also the limit. The numbers that drive the record are the ones ITV already owned, and the money is moving more slowly than the viewing. In the first half, viewing on ITVX rose 27 per cent while digital advertising revenue rose 13 per cent. Amelia MacPherson, a media analyst at RSM UK, told Advanced Television that the real test is whether ITV can turn the World Cup boost into sustainable growth, and that retaining and deepening those viewers will be crucial to converting short-term gains into long-term revenue. A record that rests on a tournament, a reality series in its run and a repeats channel is a strong quarter, not yet a business model.

Why Sky’s ITV deal turns the record into a price tag

This is where the record stops being a press release and becomes a number in a negotiation. Variety reported the terms of the deal agreed in July: up to £1.6bn for ITV Media & Entertainment, made up of £1.2bn in cash on completion, Sky’s own Love Productions, maker of The Great British Bake Off, valued at £200m, and up to £200m more in contingent payments tied to advertising revenue performance in 2027. Part of the price, in effect, depends on how ITV’s advertising performs in 2027, the year the deal is expected to close.

The deal also shows what Sky thinks it is buying. ITV Studios stays with ITV plc, and, according to Variety, will sign a long-term supply agreement covering Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Love Island, I’m A Celebrity and the daytime schedule, with a guaranteed minimum spend of £2.1bn between 2028 and 2032. Sky is locking in exactly the shows that power ITVX’s numbers. TheWrap reported that the combined business would account for around a fifth of all in-home viewing in the UK, second only to the BBC and ahead of YouTube. Dana Strong, Sky’s group chief executive, called the agreement “a defining moment for British media.”

Seen from Sky’s side, buying a habit is a rational bet. Habits are cheaper to keep than hits are to find, and a service whose biggest channels are Classic Corrie and Big Brother does not need a Hollywood budget to hold its audience.

On-demand viewing enters the Sky-ITV review

The deal is now under formal scrutiny. On 4 November 2026, the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, issued a public interest intervention notice, asking the Competition and Markets Authority and Ofcom to report back by 27 January 2027. Advanced Television published her statement, which covers news plurality and media ownership, the standard grounds in these cases, and adds a ground that, she noted, is not currently specified in the law: the availability across the UK of a wide range of broadcasting and on-demand programmes “of high quality and calculated to appeal to a wide variety of tastes and interests.” She said the change was “in line with modern viewing habits” and that she would bring forward legislation to make it permanent.

Both companies responded calmly. An ITV spokesperson told TheWrap the deal would create “a UK champion with the scale and resources to better compete with global streaming platforms.” Sky said it believes the transaction is in the public interest, with commitments already made to protect ITV’s identity, its public service obligations and the separate editorial voices of Sky News and ITV News.

For the argument here, the new ground is the telling detail. Until now, British rules about range and quality of programming were written for channels. Extending them to on-demand catalogues is an admission that the app, not the schedule, is where the national audience now gathers. The ITVX streaming record is the best evidence for that change, and ITV published it in the same week the review began.

What the ITVX numbers prove, and what they leave open

Verified: ITVX passed 3.6 billion streams on 30 October, beating its 2025 total; October brought 358 million streams, up 33 per cent; Big Brother, drama, soaps and the FAST channels drove the month, with Classic Corrie already the fifth most watched channel. ITVX had its best first half ever, with viewing up 27 per cent and digital advertising revenue up 13 per cent. Sky has agreed to pay up to £1.6bn for ITV’s channels and ITVX, part of it conditional on 2027 advertising, and the CMA and Ofcom report on the deal by 27 January 2027, with on-demand programming now part of the test. I’m A Celebrity, ITV’s biggest format, returns this month and will add to the total.

Still open: whether a stream, as ITV counts it, says much about how long people watch or how much advertisers pay; whether the growth survives a year without a World Cup; and whether Sky’s scale makes ITVX stronger against global streamers or simply more efficient at selling the same habits. MCM’s view is that the record is the right number to celebrate and the wrong one to judge by. The figure regulators should watch is what stays on ITVX, free to watch and made in Britain, after 2032, when the guaranteed spend on its soaps and reality shows ends.

Tags: Sky, Coronation Street, Big Brother, ITV, ITVX, streaming records