ITV: Building the platform behind ITVX

The Client

ITV is the UK’s largest independent television broadcaster, reaching millions of viewers daily across sport, drama, news, children’s programming and lifestyle content. As the broadcast landscape shifted, ITV moved decisively into streaming with the launch of ITVX in 2022,  a platform designed to bring their content to audiences across every major device and platform. 

TXP was engaged to provide the engineering capacity and delivery management capability needed to make that launch possible at the required pace and scale. 

The Challenge

ITVX was tied to a fixed broadcast deadline: the start of the Qatar Football World Cup in November 2022. That deadline was immovable, and the engineering scope was significant. ITV needed to accelerate platform development across the full breadth of their engineering estate, from content management and scheduling through to streaming, rights management and advertising – without disrupting the teams already in place. 

Traditional recruitment could not meet the timelines. ITV needed senior engineers and delivery managers who could integrate quickly, work across complex interdependent systems, and deliver to a hard deadline without a long onboarding curve. The specific demands were: 

• Sourcing experienced senior software engineers and delivery managers at speed, across multiple disciplines and technologies. 
• Augmenting existing ITV teams without disrupting pace or culture. 
• Delivering complex, interdependent platforms to a fixed broadcast deadline. 
• Ensuring the streaming platform could handle live event demand at World Cup scale. 

The Solution

TXP assembled a team of experienced engineers and delivery managers and had them embedded and productive within ITV’s organisation from the outset, allowing ITV’s leadership to focus on the business rather than the resourcing process. 

Over two years, TXP worked as ITV’s partner of choice for outsourced engineering across multiple departments, delivering full life-cycle projects end to end across the ITVX platform: 

• Acquisitions and Commissioning:  a data-driven platform managing the full programme life-cycle, from initial concept through development, legal, contracts and commissioning. 
• Content Scheduling: a scheduling platform responsible for broadcasting linear and on-demand content with precision timing. 
• Asset Management:  a platform for ingesting, tagging and validating broadcast-ready assets with metadata. 
• Content Delivery and Transcoding:  ensuring assets were transcoded into the correct format and delivered reliably at scale. 
• Content Rights:  consolidating legacy systems into a single source of truth for rights management across the estate. 
• ITVX:  building the TV application for Amazon, Google, Apple, Roku and other platforms, powering ITV’s streaming service for the World Cup. 
• Advertisement Platform:  managing the full life-cycle of a TV advertisement, from request and pricing through audience targeting, scheduling and broadcast. 
• Throughout, TXP worked closely with ITV’s internal teams, embedding within existing structures and adapting to the working practices of each department rather than imposing a standard delivery model. 

The Benefits

ITVX launched on time and handled World Cup-scale viewer demand without degradation in service. 

• Engineering capacity scaled rapidly across multiple departments without the cost and lead time of permanent recruitment. 
• Seven complex, interdependent platforms delivered end to end with high availability and low defect rates. 
• Scattered legacy rights systems consolidated into a single platform, reducing operational risk and improving long-term maintainability. 
• A two-year embedded partnership that extended well beyond the original deadline-driven brief.