ITV, the British TV company that is in talks to sell its broadcast unit to Sky, has beaten market forecasts with a 1% decline in 2025 adjusted operating profit and said advertising in the first quarter was better than expected.<\/p>\n
The company said today it remained in discussions after it reported profit of \u00a3534m, ahead of a consensus of \u00a3511m, on total group revenue of \u00a34.12 billion, unchanged from 2024.<\/p>\n
The “Coronation Street” broadcaster said advertising in the first quarter of 2026 would be down around 2%, better than the 4.8% drop analysts had predicted, with brand owners holding back budget for the expanded soccer World Cup in the summer.<\/p>\n
Chief executive Carolyn McCall said two-thirds of revenue now came from its ITV Studios business and its digital platform, reducing its reliance on its linear TV channels.<\/p>\n
“We have an exceptional content line-up for 2026, and are the only commercial streamer and broadcaster in the UK with rights to both the significantly expanded Men’s Football World Cup, and every England Men’s rugby match,” she said.<\/p>\n
ITV said in November it was in talks to sell its Media and Entertainment unit to pay-TV group Sky, owned by US company Comcast, for \u00a31.6 billion.<\/p>\n
“We remain in discussions with Sky regarding a possible sale of the M&E business. There can be no certainty as to whether a transaction will take place and an update will be made in due course,” ITV said in its statement.<\/p>\n
The talks have slowed in recent weeks, three people with knowledge of the matter told Reuters last month, as the battle to buy Warner Bros Discovery disrupted the industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ITV, the British TV company that is in talks to sell its broadcast unit to Sky, has beaten…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[93,61,60,282],"class_list":["post-330198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}