Media

Cantillon: UTV Ireland admits to ‘Ant and Dec problem’

Viewers can’t tell difference between its first-run episodes and repeats on TV3

Ant and Dec were two of the stars of UTV Ireland’s “Unmissable” launch campaign, but the problem for the channel is that old episodes of their shows are still being broadcast on TV3.

Thu Mar 19 2015 - 01:00

UTV Ireland has an “Ant and Dec problem”, it says. In a presentation to investors yesterday, UTV Media’s group chief executive, John McCann, highlighted three reasons why building an audience on the Republic’s television channel has been trickier than expected.

The first is the longer-than-anticipated process of getting a spot on Saorview, while the second is the “underperforming” of its array of ITV programmes, particularly at weekends (though the soaps are doing fine).

The third, related, reason involves two of the biggest ITV faces, the presenting duo Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, whose vehicle Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway runs on UTV Ireland at peak-time on Saturday evenings.

UTV Ireland has the rights to the new episodes. The problem is that TV3 still has the rights to older, pre-2015 episodes, and it is duly repeating them in an overlapping time slot, confusing everybody.

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The same practice is being applied to a number of other ITV shows, including The Jeremy Kyle Show and The Cube. UTV Ireland has the rights to new episodes, but TV3 can still, for the moment, repeat the old ones.

UTV Ireland admits to being surprised by TV3’s pragmatic schedule tactic, which is diluting the former’s potential audience all too effectively.

Last weekend, some 156,000 people watched a new edition of Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway on UTV Ireland, but 106,000 people tuned in to an old episode of the series that had begun on TV3 some 20 minutes earlier.

McCann believes that those 106,000 TV3 viewers either did not realise that a new episode was on UTV Ireland or that they were watching a repeat, or both.

Even in 2015, it is critical for a television channel to have the best possible spot on electronic programme guides. With a position at channel 103, TV3 remains easier to find on the electronic programme guide of the biggest television platform in Ireland, Sky, than UTV Ireland, which can be found at channel 116. But fans of Ant and Dec – and Jeremy – aren’t flicking their remotes that far along.

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