ITV plc

Well, you know, I thought, I would be in bed for five, six days and never be able to work at all.

The strange, funniest thing was, the next morning, daughter, I got the text message from the ITV people saying they want to come and interview us.

At 10.30, so we were up and about, had a shower, got

ready.

Yes, it was Ronaldo.

But not only that, but it was New Year's Day and the match was live on ITV.

Mike adds, I find it difficult to believe that Michael wasn't watching.

I watched this game.

Can I say, I'm a BBC man when it comes to World Cups and FA Cup.

If there's a choice, I will always watch the BBC.

But for me, ITV, yeah, a bit of Champions League on Tuesday night, that works for me.

But one thing that's missing, I think, is the ITV Sunday lunchtime kickoff.

I was speaking to Tom and Ben Curry a few weeks ago and they didn't even know World Cup were on.

But then when you turn ITV on, you'll see England are playing Scotland or Wales.

Do you know what I mean? Do we have something in the UK or in Super League where we go, right, there's going to be a three or four week break, middle of the season.

international players can play you'll have a i don't know players can still play super league rounds but you're going to lose your best players it gives opportunity for younger lads to play i don't i don't know it could be something i think

We see it every time we publish on Constitution Hill, the interest at the weekend.

The first time Italian racing had been broadcast on ITV.

Huge interest on the Racing Post live blog.

We sent Oli Barnard out to the San Siro.

Unfortunately, Italian racing has been in a difficult spot for a while, but putting on a 500,000 euro, was it? race is pretty encouraging.

Absolutely.

And credit works due to ITV as well for getting that race on terrestrial television.

I mean, I watched it.

I think that the sort of medium term is to establish ourselves as that, to be seen as that.

Obviously, what we've created is, from a darts fans perspective, is this sort of layer underneath the pdc pro tour um of darts on demand if you like always on 24 hour day tv channel free for everyone to watch live darts every day this week actually we've started um showing full full replays of the entire session a more reasonable time unfortunately it's on right now so uh it clashes with the live lounge i may have to think about this and then take a few um but yeah so building the the tv channel and making sure we're serving people that there are people that obviously are out of work during the day the times that we're on air may not suit them but they might stick it on when you come home and want to watch the full replay particularly when there's been a session like today that they've heard about um so the the tv channel the broadcast is very much our focus there are other things that we want to do i heard you were talking about um the ITV broadcast before, I wish I had their budgets, but there are things we can do to really serve our core audience, which will be a little bit different to the audience that ITV and Sky Sports are serving.

So always looking at ways we can improve there.

And we've done that.

other thing is, Netflix, I think this is being underplayed, how big a platform Netflix is to get darts on and the eyes that this is going to put on the sport.

I did a couple of interviews last week when I was in Germany about it.

This is huge for the sport, that even if we take a small percentage of those Netflix viewers and bring them over to Modus and Pluto, Sky Sports or ITV, or even if they're watching us or watching Matt Edgar's channel to know he's in the chat and so on, that is good for everyone.

That benefits everyone to take a percentage of the Netflix viewership that perhaps doesn't watch already.

says the UK government is considering introducing a new charge for viewers of TV and streaming services, which has been dubbed the YouTube tax.

Under the current rules in the UK, viewers who watch live television on channels like the BBC and ITV have to pay a license fee, which we talked about.

$240 a year to watch shit TV? Wow.

Viewers who only watch on-demand content through streaming services such as Netflix, Disney Plus, and YouTube are generally exempt.

It's like...

The orders being on ITV.

You and I talked about this being on global, you know, but I'm watching it because it's on cable.

That's where I think, that's why I'm saying TV is going to make a comeback because we all can't or won't pay for a different subscription service to every flipping league.

I just thought that was the funniest news.

But then ITV came out saying that files were deleted, but denied that it was anything to do with an AI agent acting independently and said it was a combination of human error and a failed backup system that

caused the error.

There is some element of human responsibility that needs to be taken.