ITV creates first role for ITV Player micropayments strategy
ITV is gearing up to launch online micropayments across its ITV Player early next year with the creation of its first dedicated ecommerce role.
The broadcaster, which first mooted the plan to incorporate micropayments last year, as a way of reducing its dependence on advertising, is understood to be planning to introduce subscription-fees, one off payments for bespoke content and “series stacking” – the downloading or streaming of an entire series.
It has formed the position of ecommerce content manager as part of its plans to introduce ecommerce functionality across its online TV system and “merchandise and optimise” it across multiple platforms including Freesat, Apple and Android devices as well as ITV Player.
The role is the broadcaster’s first specific ecommerce role under director of commerce and ventures William Van Rest, whose remit includes developing online partnerships with third parties, ecommerce opportunities and exploring new transactional business models for online and TV.
An ITV spokeswoman says: “As we’ve said previously, ITV will have a mechanism in place by the end of the year, which will enable us to us to start trialling a variety of pay propositions in early 2012.”
In its latest set of results ITV revealed that online revenues had rocketed 33% to £16m in the first half of the year to 30 June while the ITV Player recorded a 19% increase in average monthly unique users and long-form video views.
More recently Fru Hazlitt, managing director of commercial and online at ITV speaking at the Association of Online Publishers conference in London earlier this month, revealed that the ITV Player reached 1 billion impressions in 2010, up 60% year on year.
