From June 6th the UTV Player will be no more and NI viewers will have full access to the itv hub for the first time. All UTV Live news clips will be integrated into itv's regional news site to be fully integrated with the "itv family"
About time this happened. No more need for 2 separate apps either. I wonder if that date has been picked for a reason...? Would the new logo/look for the channel go live that day so it will sit better amongst the others in the ITV Hub website/app, or will they hold off until they have the news end sorted also?
I have to say, I wasn't expecting this to happen so soon. I thought they'd at least apply a UTV skin to the player, considering they are going to the trouble of creating a new UTV logo. This is a sign that the new logo is very much an interim until they fully rebrand to ITV Northern Ireland.
In the the meantime I guess we're going to have a mess up of the two brands such as "itv.com/utv" rather than "itv.com/northernireland". The "ITV News UTV Live" mock I posted a while back seems more likely, as much as I'd hope not.
I'd imagine the hosting and maintenance of such a service isn't cheap (maybe it was up for renewal) so probably makes financial sense for ITV to integrate into the hub thing as quickly as possible.
They possibly won't be saving much (anything?) on that front while UTV Ireland continues to run a separate site which appears to be built on the same platform and currently shares much content.
I do wonder though, if we'll see the mooted UTV rebrand on 6th June.
They possibly won't be saving much (anything?) on that front while UTV Ireland continues to run a separate site which appears to be built on the same platform and currently shares much content.
Unless they close the UTV Ireland player and make a watered down version of the ITV Hub available south of the border.
The itv hub on Youview is finally carrying itv programmes (I'm watching Emmerdale right now) at long last!
Branded itv of course... not UTV.
Spoke too soon... it's not fully functional.
While itv network programmes are now available via the itv hub app on Youview, you can't access them directly via the EPG.