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ITV Player Premium dumps catch-up ads for £3.99/month on iOS

ITV viewers can rewatch Simon Cowell’s egging with no ad breaks for £3.99/month as ITV Player Premium launches for iPhone and iPad viewers.

The world’s first ad-free catch-up app for a commercial channel launched today on iOS devices, following a successful trial of rental premieres for desktop PC and Mac users earlier this year.

James Micklethwait, ITV’s online product director, said ITV Player Premium will eventually end up on Android devices, web-based players and YouView.

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Read Recombu Digital’s guide to ITV Player“There’s a small but vocal group of ITV Player users who don’t want adverts, so we wanted to see if this would work for them,” he added.

ITV Player Premium dumps catch-up ads for £3.99/month on iOS“ITunes is the right place to start because it’s bigger by an order of magnitude than any other platform, and because Android users spend far more time online and more money, and it’s a lot less fragmented than Android.”

ITV Player Premium on iOS also comes with live streaming of ITV 3 and ITV 4, which aren’t available in the free ITV Player app, both with ad-free catch-up.

ITV catch-up on Sky and Virgin are already ad-free as part of ITV’s carriage agreements with the pay-TV services, but Micklethwait said YouView could be a candidate for the premium player if its audience reachs the right size.

PC and Mac users of ITV Player have this year been able to take part in a trial of on-demand rental premieres for the drama Scott & Bailey and the comedy Plebs, paying £1.29 to see episodes ad-free before their broadcast premiere.

Micklethwait said the response had been good, and ITV will be trialling rental premieres for ‘a handful’ more dramas this year.

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