ITV's online catch up TV offering will be revamped in an attempt to compete more effectively with the BBC's iPlayer.
Though ITV launched the service months earlier than the iPlayer, it has quickly been overhauled by the BBC's offering. Around 11m videos were viewed via the iPlayer in January, compared with just 2m for ITV.com
The company has some excellent content to show online, but has not made the most of it so far. We wrote a comparison of the two broadband services recently, and found that ITV lags behind its rival, particularly when it comes to user experience.
The player can be difficult to use at times, while too much advertising can spoil the viewing experience.
In addition, ITV has made much of the content difficult to find on the site. While all iPlayer content is accessible via a single page on bbc.co.uk, you are forced to hunt around for it on ITV.com.
The Guardian therefore reports that ITV is planning to overhaul the player, improve the navigation and promotion of content. It is also reportedly planning to boost the revamp through better marketing, something the BBC has done effectively for its service.
Related stories:
ITV.com's 'catch up TV' overeggs advertising cake
Dave and Goliath - the battle for TV audiences
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
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9:24PM on 29th April 2009
Maybe if they developed it to use a cross-platform technology they would get more viewers. BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5 all use Flash to deliver their video and it works very effectively on many different operating systems - Mac, Linux and Windows. Silveright on the other hand is not developed to the same level on Linux (mono is only silverlight 1 compatible) and ITV player fails to work.