At a time when Hollywood giants are refocusing their streaming businesses amid a growing bullseye on profitability, intense competition and signs of slowing subscriber growth, U.K. TV giant ITV is looking to take its “more than TV” strategy to a new level with Thursday’s launch of ITVX, its new free, advertising-supported streaming service that will replace its ITV Hub.
The company’s positioning and promise for the service is for it to be “the U.K.’s freshest streaming service.” For example, ITVX will offer “more than 10,000 hours” of content, compared with about 4,000 on ITV Hub so far. That includes new originals every week, starting with the likes of six-part Cold War drama A Spy Among Friends, starring Damian Lewis and Guy Pearce, and teen drama Tell Me Everything, and “one of the U.K.’s largest free film libraries” with 250 movies at any one time and around 1,000 available over…
