Early success for ITV dual screen initiative

ITV Live, the commercial broadcasters new ‘dual-screen’ initiative, has attracted more than one million users in its first week.

Described by ITV as a “live online companion”, ITV Live is looking to take advantage of those who interact with social networking sites while watching television. During the World Cup the service has combined action replays, real-time statistics, voting tools and instant comments from fans and experts, with live video.

Across the first seven days of the competition ITV Live saw a peak of 204,000 unique users for the Holland v Denmark match and an average of 130k unique users across all ITV games. Across the two peak-time England matches so far the service saw 90,000 unique users for England v USA and 121,000 unique users for England v Algeria. The broadcaster shares the rights to the World Cup with the BBC.

Live streaming of games across the site in the first week, both within ITV Live experience and at ITV.com/ITV1, saw a peak of 94,000 streams during the first round clash between Argentina and South Korea.

Arguably audiences could have been higher given that other social networking sites reported difficulties from users trying to access the ITV site.

ITV Live has been built and designed in partnership with live social TV specialists Montrose, alongside Origin Digital. ITV and partners have worked closely with Akamai to optimise content delivery on ITV Live through its High Demand (HD) network.