ITV - old website URLs

Interestingly both www.htv.co.uk and www.yorkshiretv.co.uk redirect to the ITV News pages (national though, not regional) and www.granada.co.uk redirects to the ITV Hub pages.

www.meridiantv.co.uk redirects to the Meridian regional news pages. www.channelonline.tv redirects to Channel's. There really should be some consistency here!

I don't think granada.co.uk was ever used for Granada TV. It was granadatv.co.uk, which redirects to the ITV News page.

In 1996, it was used for Granada Group - https://web.archive.org/web/19961221090729/http://www.granada.co.uk/

With the formation of ITV plc, it redirected to www.itv.com/about

So you're right, it was never used for the regional broadcaster.

The URL as seen on idents of the time was www.granada-tv.com

http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/itvnorthwest/itv_northwest_images/idents/gtv_ident_daytime2000a.jpg

Looking at the Wayback Archive, it looks as though it redirected to itv.com/granada as late as 2011, but has now lapsed and is available to register.

They're unlikely to introduce any consistency, given that they seem to be letting a lot of the old urls expire, without being renewed. Here are some examples of urls which are no longer owned by itv:

border-tv.com
carlton.com
granada.tv
meridiantv.com
tynetees.tv
westcountry.co.uk

Tyne Tees was the exception wasn't it - I seem to recall tynetees.tv lasted a lot longer than the others (and there was the infamous relaunch that took years to actually appear)

I remember the site and the analogue clock on the home page.

UTV went through a fair amount of web addresses themselves. Before u.tv, they had UTV.co.uk and UTV.ie (the latter now used by UTV Ireland), before that utvinternet.com (which the regulators weren't too happy about). ISTR they had one before that, which I *think* was utvlive.com, but we are back in the 1990s at that stage.

I always found it strange that ITV never got the i.tv web address for themselves.

.tv addresses are strange beasts, they're technically assigned to Tuvalu, a small island in the middle of the Pacific that's still part of the British Commonwealth. However the government there effectively rents the .tv domain out and makes a fortune off it every year thanks to the growth of .tv domains in recent years.

They used to cost a fortune to buy as well, they're cheaper now than they used to be, whereas the likes of itv.com and itv.co.uk one can now get for two years for next to nothing, plus they've had them for years (itv.com from 1994, itv.co.uk since before Aug 1996 - back in the days when we all went on the internet Compuserve style!)

.tv sites only became available to buy in 2000, and the .tv popularity thing started from 2006. The website i.tv had already been taken in 2003, apparently you can't transfer them.

Incidentally the term iTV was bounded around as a rumoured Apple Television (as in a TV set). It never happened like that, though Apple Television does exist as a streaming service.

ITV put a story in the press about 'considering legal action' against Apple (presumably this is far cheaper than the cost of writing a legal letter to Apple direct).

The itv.com domain was owned by a Brit who was fairly savvy early on in the days of the Internet and registered it as one of his domains that pointed to some sort of research company, with a webpage deliberately set up to make it look as if ITV stood for something to do with this (at the time cybersquatting was commonplace and big businesses were trying to stamp it out to claim their domains - if it had just pointed to a blank page, ITV could have claimed it as theirs).

I'd imagine it was sold to Carlton & Granada at a premium when they merged their only operations to form the groundbreaking (ahem) ITV.com:



Prior to ITV.com, there were all sorts of problems with ITV's online presence. ITV.co.uk was overseen by ITV Network Centre, and basically just linked to various programme websites, each of which was operated by their production companies.

Before there was an agreed policy on how to promote the website, you'd have This Morning directing the viewer to itv-thismorning.co.uk and CITV pushing citv.co.uk. As with everything in the ITV network, it was all about money and trying to get traffic directly to their product. I think eventually it was agreed to only plug itv.co.uk, which wasn't ideal as it wasn't the best homepage to navigate so you'd be ages looking for the home page for Popstars.

The initial ITV.com was still a mess (see above) of different programme sites, and they've only really got their act together in recent years.

Millionaire had its own website as well.
The ill-fated ITV Day of Promise had its own website as well which was at the clumsy itv.yearofpromise.co.uk address.

Mind you, the BBC were giving out web addresses on the air like this in 1995: