ITV News Channel

The **ITV News Channel** is a 24-hour rolling news channel operated by ITV plc. The channel currently competes with the BBC News Channel and Sky News.

## History

### Establishment and early years

The channel launched on August 1, 2000 as a joint venture between ITN and NTL as the "ITN News Channel". In June 2002, Carlton Television and Granada Television - the predecessors of ITV plc - bought out ITN's 65-per-cent stake. This led to a rebrand as the ITV News Channel in September 2002. In April 2004 the newly created ITV plc bought NTL's 35-per-cent stake to assume full control of the channel.

As the ITN News Channel, it was broadcast from a small studio with accommodation for only one presenter at a time. When relaunched as the ITV News Channel, it initially used the standard ITV News studio of the time, which was built for fixed length bulletins only, so the style of presentation was always more basic than that of its competitors.

From the February 2004 relaunch, the channel came into its own. Along with the rest of ITV News, the channel was presented from the so-called 'theatre of news' set, a large virtual studio allowing presentation either from behind a desk or by presenters walking around, using the news wall to explain a story with the aid of graphics. For the first time, two presenters could present the channel together, which the management viewed as an improvement.

As the channel, at the time, shared facilities with ITV News bulletins on the ITV Network (which were also simulcast on the news channel), it had to move to other studios for around an hour before each ITV bulletin to allow for rehearsals. Initially a single locked-off camera studio was used at these times, which was very basic. Later the channel used a virtual reality studio at these times or, following ITN's takeover of the production of London Tonight, that studio.

### Closure

In December 2005 it was confirmed that the channel would close down in 2006, in order to use its Freeview bandwidth (which was already timeshared with ITV4) to launch the CITV channel based on the existing CITV brand, and to use its funding to boost ITV News coverage on the main ITV Network. But on December 15, 2005 the decision was taken to close the ITV News Channel.

The closure was subsequently brought forward and the channel closed down on Friday, December 23, 2005 at 18:00 (GMT). The reason given was that it would have been unfair to expect the channel's staff to work long hours over Christmas knowing that the channel would soon be closing.

### Relaunch

Multiple rumors and related plans have pointed towards the resurrection of the channel.

On June 15, 2007, ITN chief executive Mark Wood said the company would not rule out launching another 24-hour TV news channel.

During 2007 there was some speculation that cable television operator Virgin Media was considering launching its own news channel to rival Sky News and BBC News, with some reports suggesting that it might look to partner with ITN, but this has not occurred.

In April, ITV plc declared that it was to relaunch the ITV News Channel. It was scheduled to return to the air on Monday, June 5, 2017, 11 years and 5 months after the closure of the original ITV News Channel. However, on June 3, ITV announced that the channel would go on the air earlier than announced in order to provide coverage of a terrorist attack that occurred in London that night. Regularly-scheduled bulletins and programming commenced on June 5.