ITV to relaunch site with social media features

ITV is to relaunch its website next year with a focus on social media and its most popular shows. "Project Penguin" will involve a restructuring of ITV’s content management system and see content-sharing and discussion features introduced. ITV last week rebranded its online catch-up service as ITV Player, which will focus on its biggest shows in a ‘fewer, bigger, better’ strategy.

This change comes after recent increases of usage of the ITV Catch up service (recently rebranded as ITV Player): In November video views had reached 15.7m, up 1m on the previous month and near 600% increase year on year. Although this number is way below the similar service offered by the BBC the UK online media industry is doing extremely well: In general the audience for online video is growing eight times faster in the UK than the US (source: ComScore Media Metrix) mainly due to the maturity of the online video streaming industry in the US.