Sky agrees to buy ITV media and entertainment arm

Sky has agreed to buy ITV’s media and entertainment business for £1.6bn, a deal that would bring ITV’s broadcast channels and the ITVX streaming service under the same roof as Sky’s pay-TV and streaming operations. ITV’s production arm, ITV Studios, is excluded, leaving the company split between programme-making and a distribution business that will be absorbed by a larger platform. According to the BBC, Comcast-owned Sky began takeover talks with ITV last November.

The transaction is pitched as a response to a UK market that has been pulled apart by global streaming services and YouTube, where scale buys marketing reach, technology spend and negotiating leverage. Sky’s chief executive Dana Strong called it “a defining moment for British media”, while Sky said the industry is undergoing rapid transformation and needs bigger players to compete. Yet the deal also formalises a reality that UK broadcasters have been living with for years: the audience has moved to on-demand viewing, but the cost base—newsrooms, studios, compliance, distribution contracts—still looks like the broadcast era.

ITV’s public service broadcasting licence complicates the consolidation. The BBC reports ITV is legally required to provide a free-to-air service until at least 2034, meaning the channels being sold come with obligations as well as advertising inventory. Sky said there would be no immediate changes to flagship shows including Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Love Island and News at Ten, and that major live sporting events will continue to be broadcast. In practice, the question is not whether programmes disappear overnight, but who controls commissioning budgets, prominence on platforms, and the data that increasingly determines what gets made.

Keeping ITV Studios outside the sale leaves one of the most valuable pieces of the ecosystem—production—on a separate balance sheet. Sky has agreed to spend £2.1bn over five years on content from ITV Studios, effectively turning a former in-house supplier into a contracted one. That promise offers ITV Studios revenue visibility, but it also locks a large share of its output into one buyer relationship at a time when rights negotiations and windowing strategies are becoming the main battleground.

If regulators focus on “plurality”, they will be looking at a market where the loudest competition is no longer another British broadcaster but a handful of global platforms with different rules, different economics and no domestic licence obligations. The BBC’s list of shows Sky says will remain unchanged reads like a reassurance aimed at viewers, but it is also an inventory of brands whose value depends on distribution and discoverability rather than transmitter coverage.

ITV will still have studios making Love Island and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. The channels that first aired them would belong to Sky.