ITV

ITV’s full-year 2025 results tell the story of a broadcaster in managed decline on its traditional revenue lines but with genuine momentum on the digital side, a balance the company frames as transformation rather than contraction. Group total external revenue rose by a modest 1% to £3.51 billion, while total group revenue was flat at £4.12 billion. The headline profitability metric, adjusted EBITA, fell 1% to £534 million, with a margin of 15.2% (down 0.3 percentage points year-on-year). Adjusted earnings per share dropped more sharply, down 11% to 8.5 pence.

The structural picture is clear. Total advertising revenue (TAR) fell 5% to £1.72 billion, in part because 2024 benefited from the Men’s Euros advertising surge. Linear TV remains the engine that funds everything else, but it is a shrinking one. Against that, ITV Studios grew external revenue by 10%, driven by demand from global streaming platforms and double-digit growth in Zoo 55, its digital distribution label. ITV Studios’ adjusted EBITA of £297 million was nearly flat year-on-year (2024: £299 million), with a margin of 13.9%.

The statutory numbers are considerably worse, and the difference matters. Statutory profit before tax fell 35% to £338 million and statutory EPS was down 43% to 5.9 pence. The primary explanation is that 2024 included a one-off £194 million profit from the sale of BritBox International to the BBC. Strip that out and the underlying trading trajectory is less dramatic, but the statutory fall will nonetheless catch headlines and may obscure ITV’s actual operational performance for less attentive observers. Free cash flow came in at £187 million (2024: £325 million), a significant fall, while net debt rose to £566 million. The board maintained its dividend at 5.0 pence per share, distributing around £190 million to shareholders.

On the digital side, ITVX delivered streaming hours up 16% to 2.3 billion, monthly active users up 12% to 16.5 million, and digital advertising revenues up 12%. Total digital revenue grew 10% to £614 million. Digital advertising now accounts for 31% of total advertising revenues.

ITV Group: Key Financial Metrics, FY2025 vs FY2024

Source: ITV plc Full-Year Results, twelve months ended 31 December 2025. Statutory profit before tax decline reflects the prior year including £194m profit on sale of BritBox International.

ITV operates across two principal divisions. The Media & Entertainment (M&E) segment encompasses the company’s UK-facing broadcasting and streaming activities. This includes the ITV family of linear TV channels (ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4 and ITV Quiz, rebranded from ITVBe in 2025) along with the ITVX streaming platform and Planet V, ITV’s wholly-owned targeted advertising platform. ITVX offers approximately 27,000 hours of content including live and on-demand output from the linear channels, exclusive content across sport, true crime and US box sets, ITVX Kids and ITVX News, and one of the UK’s largest free-to-access film libraries. At end-2025, ITVX counted 40 million registered users and 16.5 million monthly active users.

ITV Studios is the company’s production and distribution arm, the largest TV producer in the UK and one of the largest independent producers globally. It creates scripted and unscripted content across multiple territories, with 59% of revenue generated internationally and 28% derived from streaming platform commissions. Its library of over 100,000 hours of IP is licensed to more than 350 customers globally, and includes formats such as Love Island, The Voice, I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!, and Coronation Street. Zoo 55, a digital distribution label within Studios, distributes long and short-form content across FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV), AVOD and social video channels worldwide.

A third asset, ITVX Premium, the subscription tier, is shrinking deliberately. UK streaming subscriptions fell to 0.9 million at end-2025 (2024: 1.0 million) as ITV pivots away from subscription video-on-demand and doubles down on its ad-funded model. BritBox International, the subscription service co-owned with the BBC, was sold in 2024, generating the one-off profit that now distorts year-on-year statutory comparisons.

Future Outlook and Key Challenges

ITV entered 2026 as a company in the middle of several overlapping transitions, strategic, structural and potentially corporate, whose outcomes will define its shape for years to come. What the 2025 annual results reveal, beneath the broadly positive digital trading figures, is an organisation managing a number of significant pressures simultaneously: a possible change of ownership, a shrinking workforce in its broadcasting division, a regulatory environment that is tightening, and a pension legacy whose full costs are still being worked through. None of these are immediately destabilising, but together they represent a more uncertain outlook than the headline numbers suggest.

The most consequential question hanging over ITV is whether it will continue to exist as an integrated broadcaster and producer. Since November 2025, the company has been in active discussions with Sky regarding a possible sale of the entire Media & Entertainment division, the part of ITV that includes its linear TV channels, ITVX, ITV News and its public service broadcasting licence obligations. Sky is owned by Comcast, the US cable and media conglomerate. ITV is careful to note there is no certainty a transaction will proceed, but the discussions are ongoing and the strategic logic is not hard to follow: ITV management has spent several years repositioning the company as two distinct businesses, a global content studio and a UK digital broadcaster, and a sale of M&E would complete that separation.

The consequences for public service broadcasting in the UK would be far-reaching. ITV holds a Channel 3 licence that carries statutory obligations around news provision, regional programming and content quotas. Those obligations would transfer with the business. Whether a Comcast-owned Sky would approach those commitments in the same way as an independent ITV is a question that Ofcom and policymakers will need to address if negotiations reach the point of a formal deal.

The workforce figures in the 2025 results tell a story of accelerating restructuring concentrated in the broadcasting division. ITV’s total workforce fell by 206 on a monthly average basis, but the reduction was not evenly distributed: ITV Studios lost 37 employees (–1%), while Media & Entertainment shed 169 (–6%) in a single year. Operating exceptional charges, which capture redundancy and restructuring costs, rose to £107 million in 2025, up from £65 million the year before. Since 2019, ITV has delivered £253 million of permanent cost savings, a programme that is set to continue with a further £20 million targeted for 2026.

ITV Workforce and Cost Restructuring, FY2025 vs FY2024

Source: ITV plc Full-Year Results, twelve months ended 31 December 2025. Headcount figures are monthly averages. Exceptional items include restructuring, transformation and corporate transaction costs.

ITV’s digital growth story is real but increasingly one-dimensional. ITVX delivered strong numbers in 2025, streaming hours up 16%, digital advertising revenue up 12%, monthly active users up 12% to 16.5 million, and the platform recouped its entire investment four years ahead of the original schedule. However, this performance was achieved by abandoning a core part of the original strategy. ITVX launched in 2022 with a target of £750 million in total digital revenue, partly driven by subscription growth. That target will now take longer to reach than planned, and UK streaming subscriptions have fallen below one million. ITV has pivoted fully to an ad-funded model, making the platform’s future financial performance entirely dependent on the health of the UK digital advertising market.

That market faces its own headwinds. New restrictions on less healthy food advertising, across both broadcast and online, came into effect in January 2026 and will reduce a significant category of advertising spend available to ITV. The company has not disclosed the expected revenue impact. Meanwhile, ITV is competing for digital advertising budgets against the major global platforms, and its self-serve advertising offering is still in development, being built in collaboration with Sky, Channel 4 and Comcast’s Universal Ads platform. The irony is not lost: ITV is commercially partnering with the company that may be about to acquire its broadcasting division.

ITV is navigating an unusually active regulatory period. Beyond the food advertising restrictions, Ofcom is in the process of implementing the Media Act, which includes new requirements around the prominence and discoverability of public service content on digital platforms. These provisions are designed to ensure that PSB content, including ITV’s, remains visible and accessible as audiences shift from linear television to streaming and platform-mediated viewing. The practical implications of those rules become substantially more complicated if ITV’s broadcasting arm is sold to Sky, a platform operator that both distributes ITV content and, under this scenario, would own it.

Finally, ITV’s defined benefit pension position shows a surplus of £207 million on an accounting basis, and management presents the pension situation as largely settled. In practice, 2025 was a year of significant cash outflows to resolve longstanding legacy liabilities. The company injected £12 million funded via gilt sales, £25 million into the main scheme, £6 million to the Pension Protection Fund, and a further £25 million to unwind the SDN Pension Funding Partnership, the last relating to the television transmission network ITV used as pension security in 2010. The Box Clever Group Pension Scheme, a liability inherited from a rental and retail subsidiary that collapsed in the early 2000s, was finally resolved in October 2025 after a provision of £52 million was released. The UTV Pension Scheme, acquired with Ulster Television in 2016, was wound up in February 2026. These resolutions are genuinely positive, but they came at substantial cash cost. Any acquirer of M&E would inherit the remaining structure of these obligations and would need to satisfy pension trustees as part of any transaction.

In conclusion, the longer-term picture is less settled. The potential sale to Sky is the defining variable: if it proceeds, ITV as a standalone integrated broadcaster will cease to exist, and the future of its public service obligations (news, regional programming, content quotas) will be determined by negotiation between Comcast, the UK government and Ofcom. If it does not proceed, ITV faces the challenge of sustaining a broadcasting division whose linear revenues are in structural decline, whose workforce is shrinking, and whose digital strategy is now entirely dependent on advertising income in an increasingly competitive market. Either way, the company that emerges from the next two to three years will look substantially different from the one that published these results.