ITV is shutting down its CITV channel and shifting most of its children’s programmes to streaming-only, arguing that young people have largely given up on watching scheduled television.
CITV will disappear as a standalone channel in the autumn, with all children’s content shifting to the streaming platform ITVX. The broadcaster said the channel was unprofitable and children’s TV audiences had collapsed in recent years because of a shift to YouTube and other streaming services.
ITV said the average time spent by British children watching children’s television channels had declined by 62% since 2019. The BBC has already announced plans to make its CBBC channel online-only, although the preschool CBeebies remains safe for now.
Greg Childs, of the Children’s Media Foundation, said ITV had failed to invest in younger viewers, meaning it would not build brand loyalty at early stage.
“Children’s programming always was loss-making. The question is: do you want to provide for the children’s audience?” he said.
Childs said he understood the shift towards a streaming-first model but the bigger concern was that ITV had few plans to spend money producing original programmes for British children, regardless of where they appear.
When CITV launched as a standalone channel in 2006, the company was spending about £35m a year on children’s programming. Almost two decades later, its outlay is only a few million a year.
Under ITV’s proposals, the long-running CITV brand will largely disappear from screens, although it will still appear during some early morning programming on ITV2 and ITVBe.
Some original CITV series – such as the Grimsby-based The Rubbish World of Dave Spud – will continue to be made and shown on the streaming service but new commissions are under review.
Many in the industry blame the 2006 ban on advertising junk food to children for the start of the decline of children’s television programming on commercial outlets. This reduced budgets, while the recent shift to online viewing has exacerbated the audience decline.
One solution is to provide public funding for children’s programming. The government provided £44m of public funding over three years for children’s programming through the young audiences content fund. This was designed to help commercial broadcasters such as ITV and Channel 5 afford to commission new shows.
However, the fund was axed last year, a decision that has been blamed for a further downturn in British children’s television production.
Childs said his organisation wanted the government to relaunch the fund, this time funded by a levy on major streaming companies such as Netflix and Amazon.
He warned against leaving behind children who only had access to broadcast television. “Not all kids are online,” he said.
