Latest In The TV Market: September 2026

A September read of the UK TV market. September is the month the market stops being quiet: the autumn schedules land, the football season is fully underway, and Q4 starts to price. It opens with two questions that both run past this month — what a terrestrial switch-off date would do to commercial PSB revenue, and who ends up owning ITV. Programme rankings firm up as final BARB data arrives; commercial and agency items are drawn from trade coverage over the period. This piece is written during the month and revised as it develops.

Commercial programming and viewing

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising published Making Sense 8 on 9 September, and its TouchPoints numbers reset the terms of the young-adult television argument. Across all British adults the television set and the smartphone now take an equal 34% of commercial media time — parity, and itself the headline. Among 16-34s the television set takes 21%, down from 32% in 2015, while the smartphone takes 49%. The measure that matters most for a cross-generational brief is reach overlap between the generations, which has halved from 44% in 2015 to 22%. Alongside it, 44% of British adults’ commercial media time is now consumed alone — more than two and a half hours a day, against one hour 56 minutes in 2015 — and among 16-34s that alone share reaches 49%.

The buying consequence is specific, and it is not that television has stopped working. On the all-adult numbers the set is still level with the smartphone, and the efficiency case for broadcast against an adult audience is undamaged. What has gone is the second argument the sales houses attach to it. Co-viewing is a claim about households, and the IPA has just measured the household dispersing into separate rooms: at 22% overlap, television alone no longer lands one message across two generations. Buy broadcast for adult efficiency, price the 16-34 shortfall honestly, and treat shared-experience framing as a claim to be evidenced rather than accepted.

The other change to the month is definitional. On 19 August YouTube announced that from 24 August a view would register the moment a video begins to play, from the first frame, with no minimum duration, across long-form, Shorts and livestreams; the watch-duration measure survives as “Engaged Views” inside YouTube Analytics rather than as the public number. The platform has aligned its currency with Shorts, TikTok and Reels rather than with television. The context makes it sharper: Barb became the first joint-industry body anywhere to report viewing of individual YouTube channels in July 2025, and that service has been paused since Google issued cease-and-desist letters to Barb and Kantar Media in late January this year.

This is not a quality argument, and there is no need to have one. It is that one side of a video plan is priced against a currency the industry owns collectively and votes on, and the other against a number its owner redefined on nine days’ notice. Split the plan by currency rather than by screen, insist on engaged-view reporting on any YouTube line, and do not let a redefined view sit in the same reach column as a broadcast impact. Traffic is moving both ways in the meantime: ITV has ordered a 12×30 television version of My Year In A Cottage Garden With Alan Titchmarsh for 2027 from a YouTube series with more than 100 million views, and the airtime around it will be ordinary ITV airtime on the ordinary currency, while Channel 4’s own commercial team has launched a Maggi recipe series for Channel 4 Served across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.

Barb’s Q2 2026 Establishment Survey has put a marker on where streaming growth in this country has got to. Total SVOD access is 20.7m UK homes, 69.7% of the base, fractionally down from 20.8m in Q1. Netflix slipped from 18.1m homes to 18.0m (60.4%), Amazon Prime Video from 13.7m to 13.6m (45.9%). On the top line, the land grab is finished.

Underneath it, the number that matters to a buyer went the other way. Ad-tier homes rose on all three services that sell one: Amazon 89% of its homes, giving 12.1m (40.6%); Netflix 41%, up from 40%, giving 7.3m (24.6%); Disney+ 40%, up from 37%, giving 3.6m (12.0%). Paramount+ added half a million homes to reach 4.0m (13.4%), Discovery+ 3.7m (12.4%), Apple TV down to 2.8m (9.6%), NOW flat at 2.0m (6.7%).

Two things follow. Amazon’s 12.1m ad-tier homes exceed Netflix’s and Disney’s combined, and it got there by moving existing subscribers onto ads by default rather than by selling an ad tier to anyone — reach parity is not attention parity, and a plan that treats those three figures as interchangeable is wrong. And if total access is flat while ad-tier penetration climbs, ad-funded streaming supply now grows chiefly by re-tiering existing subscribers. That is a supply curve that can move far faster than an audience curve, and inventory growing faster than viewing puts downward pressure on price. One caution on all of it: the Establishment Survey measures household access, not subscriptions and not impressions. Do not convert these into deliverable reach without the ad-load and consent assumptions behind each platform.

Arqiva-commissioned research from Liberty Sky Advisors has put a figure on the terrestrial switch-off question: commercial PSB advertising revenue of £3.1bn under a 2034 switch-off against £3.64bn if the date slips to 2044 — a 16% difference. The more useful finding is about timing. The report argues the damage is done when a date is announced, not when transmitters are turned off, because the announcement is what triggers advertisers to reclassify television out of its own budget line and into general video.

That reclassification is the actual exposure. TV has held its share partly because advertisers treat it as a separate, known, safe category with a dedicated budget — once an end date is confirmed, that separation erodes and agencies start buying TV inside a single video pot alongside YouTube, Meta and Amazon. Channel 4 is the most exposed, being ad-dependent and unable to raise equity capital. Steve King, formerly chief executive of Publicis Media, put it more bluntly, suggesting broadcasters’ own push for switch-off “may well turn out to be the thing that kills their own premium product”. Worth noting alongside it: ITV’s public service licences expire in 2034, the same year as the proposed switch-off date.

Channel 4 has replaced An Extra Slice with a new Great British Bake Off companion show, Second Helpings, hosted by Jon Richardson with Judi Love and Nigella Lawson. It runs weekly on the same night as the main series. Sponsorable inventory is not yet on the rate card, which makes it worth an early conversation rather than a rate-card comparison — a first-series companion slot attached to a proven Q4 franchise usually prices more sensibly before it has a delivery record than after.

NFL on 5 returns from Sunday 13 September, hosted by Dermot O’Leary, Sam Quek and Osi Umenyiora and produced by Hungry Bear Media. Two live games every Sunday of the regular season, free to air: the first from 6pm on 5Action with coverage from 5.30pm, the second from 9pm on 5, with the refreshed format built around the 9.25pm fixture. A season-long Sunday-night live sport strip on a Paramount-owned sales point is worth costing before kick-off rather than after — both sponsorship and in-break. Separately, Sky News relaunched its Sunday morning flagship on 6 September as Sunday Morning with…, a rotating guest-presenter format following Trevor Phillips’s move to CBS News, going out live across Sky News, YouTube, the app, web and social. News sponsorship carries its own constraints; the simulcast footprint is the part worth asking about.

The supply side of sponsorship tightened again. Pact’s 2026 census, reported on 9 September, has total independent sector revenues at £3.81bn, up 4.1%, on international TV revenue of £1.57bn, up 15.8%, and record international digital commissions of £916m — while domestic television revenue fell 4.7% to £1.99bn and UK primary commissions fell 4.67% to £1.65bn, of which the public service broadcasters were 85.9%, or £1.42bn. The formats a sponsor buys idents around are funded by the domestic line, which has now fallen for a second year, so expect fewer new returnable formats to sponsor in 2027 and hold renewals accordingly.

The autumn relaunch is the engine underneath all of this. On the commercial channels, Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off returns to anchor its biggest audiences of the season, while ITV1 rebuilds weekday and weekend peak with its returning entertainment slate and autumn dramas. These tentpoles are what pull family and mass-reach audiences back to linear after the summer, and they carry the premium peak inventory that will be hardest to buy as the month goes on.

Sport is the other pillar. The Premier League is in full flow and the Champions League league phase returns through the month across Sky Sports and TNT Sports, delivering the younger and male audiences that are difficult to reach anywhere else at scale. Peak-time commercial impacts should build steadily as the schedule strengthens; treat any early-month audience read as provisional and confirm final deliveries and rankings with BARB.

Advertiser and category movement

PepsiCo has appointed Publicis Groupe to its global media account without a pitch, leaving Omnicom after more than 25 years, and Publicis has withdrawn from the Coca-Cola global media pitch as a consequence. Both are Campaign reports of 2 September; the bodies are paywalled, so no billings figure is quoted here. Omnicom stock fell 5% on the news.

The UK consequence is in aggregate trading rather than in the account itself. Sales houses price pooled volume deals against a holding company’s total billings, and Omnicom has lost a quarter-century global client days after merging Hearts & Science and Mediahub into Hearts United on 28 August and reorganising its UK leadership on 27 August. A group negotiating 2027 with a smaller book than the one it committed against is a different counterparty. If your business trades inside an Omnicom pool, that is a question for this week, not for the January reconciliation. Coca-Cola, meanwhile, was on Campaign’s 18 August list of the largest accounts due to close in H2, and a pitch with fewer bidders closes sooner.

Flutter has put up to 100 Paddy Power shops and around 400 roles under review after a Q2 that swung from a $37m profit to a $296m loss (roughly £234m), even as UK and Ireland revenue grew 4% to $971m (about £765m). Outgoing chief executive Peter Jackson — Dan Taylor succeeds him — was explicit that the group intends to keep “our foot down hard on the marketing and generosity side”. Retail retrenchment in this category has not historically read across to airtime, and on the company’s own account it is not about to.

The signature September category is motoring. The new “76” registration plate landed on 1 September, and car marques and dealer groups traditionally weight spend into the month around it — expect motoring to be one of the more visible categories on screen. Retail and finance step up in the back half of the month as Christmas positioning begins, while the back-to-school category tails off through early September.

More broadly, September is the on-ramp to the Q4 spend surge. The categories that dominate November and December — supermarkets, general retail, fragrance and gifting, toys and entertainment — start staking their positions now, competing with FMCG, telco and streaming for the returning autumn audiences. That early jostling is a large part of why the market firms so quickly this month.

Broadcaster, agency and platform news

The Trade Desk removed about 15% of its global workforce on Friday 4 September — roughly 575 people against the 3,843 full-time staff it reported at the end of 2025 — with no regional or functional breakdown given. It is not a solvency event: the company holds about $1.5bn in cash with no debt, and puts restructuring charges at $39m to $51m, recognised in Q3. It is a growth event. Q2 revenue of $715m was up 3% and came in under the company’s own guidance of at least $750m, and Q3 is guided to at least $650m — a decline of about 12% year on year. Jeff Green named macroeconomic pressure on the largest brands, with automotive and CPG, a quarter of platform business, under specific strain. Two lines are still growing hard: connected TV was up more than 50% year on year in EMEA, and joint business plans reached 217 clients, up 38%, with revenue under those plans growing at six times the company rate.

The read for a UK buyer is straightforward. A platform guiding down 12%, whose only real growth engines are CTV and joint business plans, will push both much harder into Q4 — so read a JBP approach as the seller’s necessity rather than the buyer’s favour, and treat the 50% EMEA CTV figure as a negotiating position rather than a proof point. The practical exposure is service coverage: the cuts came nine days after the Kokai Zuma platform rebuild shipped on 27 August, in the busiest quarter of the year. Confirm your named trading and client-service contacts, and your escalation path, in writing before Q4 money is committed.

Clearcast has extended beyond broadcast pre-clearance for the first time. Announced on 8 September, iClear offers automated assessment of scripts, images and video against the CAP Code, flagging and explaining risk before publication, and allClear adds human review by Clearcast’s compliance team together with Clearcast support for an advertiser’s defence if the ASA investigates. It launches with five verticals — food and beverage, alcohol, gambling, harm and offence, and misleading advertising — and no pricing has been published. The clearance burden that makes television slower and dearer than digital has been one of the more honest arguments against broadcast for twenty years, and the television clearance body has now started selling the missing half to the other side. For regulated-category clients it means documented pre-publication advice on non-broadcast work is purchasable for the first time; it does not make digital pre-clearance mandatory, and it does not stop the ASA banning an ad after the fact.

The competition review of Sky/ITV has not started. The CMA opened its case on 23 July, the comment window closed on 6 August and no Phase 1 investigation had opened by the time of writing, with no statutory deadline forcing one. Anyone negotiating 2027 airtime is doing so against undecided ownership, an undecided platform closure date and licence obligations that expire in the same year.

Barb attributes the quarter’s biggest single move directly to Sky. Disney+ added more than 1.1m homes, including just over 700,000 ad-tier homes, which Barb’s head of insight Doug Whelpdale says “would appear to be a direct result of the partnership announced in March this year that saw Disney+ (with ads) added to eligible Sky packages for no extra cost.”

Read that against the ownership question. Sky’s distribution has just manufactured 700,000 ad-tier homes for a rival’s advertising business, at no cost to the consumer, in the same quarter in which Sky is trying to buy ITV’s advertising business through a competition process that has not formally begun. Sky’s own submission will argue for a wide market definition. Its set-top boxes have just supplied the evidence.

In shorter trade news, Omnicom’s merged agency Hearts United has its first publicly credited win, with Go.Compare renewing its sponsorship of ITV’s This Morning. Elsewhere, McCain has launched a UK media review, and Havas has appointed Patrick Affleck to a new UK Village chief executive role spanning media and creative.

Cost of TV and buying conditions

Ebiquity’s TV profit study for Isba gives buyers the argument they need going into a tightening Q4. Across the investment analysed, “total TV” — linear, BVOD, SVOD, CTV and YouTube taken together — accounts for 54% of advertising profit. Linear still does the heavy lifting, returning 57% of TV-generated profit off 54% of total TV spend, which is a straightforward efficiency case rather than a legacy one. The more interesting number is BVOD: 21% of TV profit from 15% of campaign impressions, the best profit-to-impression ratio in the study. SVOD shows the highest uplift per thousand impressions but averages only 10% of impressions, so it remains an incremental layer rather than a base. CTV sits at 2% of impressions across the £100m of analysed investment. YouTube contributes 10% of TV profit with two-thirds of its impressions delivered on television sets, which is a reasonable prompt to stop treating it as a separate line and start judging it on the same terms as the rest.

The Sky acquisition terms put a visible floor under ITV’s 2027 pricing. The deal carries an earn-out paying £2 of consideration for each £1 by which ITV’s total advertising revenue exceeds £1.7bn in FY 2027, capped at £200m and payable in H2 2028. For context, ITV’s FY 2025 total advertising revenue was £1,723m, down 5% on FY 2024’s £1,820m — so the £1.7bn threshold sits roughly at 2025’s outturn, and the cap only pays out at around 2024 levels. H1 2026 ran 3% ahead at £850m, with digital up 27%.

The mechanism matters more than the numbers. Because the earn-out measures revenue rather than rate, ITV has a direct financial incentive not to discount deeply into 2027 — but no equivalent incentive to hold rate if volume can make up the difference. That points buyers towards volume commitments and share deals rather than headline CPT reductions, which is the opposite of where most 2027 conversations will open.

Out of home is the only medium to have reported the quarter, and it makes the point that TV is not repricing in isolation. Revenue reached £402.6m, up 12.7% — the highest Q2 on record and the second-highest quarter overall after Q4 2025. The half closed at £743.9m, up 13.7%, with digital up 15.9% against 9.4% for classic, and DOOH is now 68% of the total, up a point on the 2024-25 annual shares. JCDecaux UK grew programmatic revenue 30.9% organically in the half to 12.3% of digital revenue. Against AA/WARC’s full-year out of home forecast of 7.6%, the medium is running at close to double its own expected finish rate. The read-across for TV buyers is that the pressure on Q4 rate is not a television problem — the whole of broadcast-scale reach is repricing at once, and budgets moved out of TV on cost grounds are unlikely to find relief next door. Note the asymmetry too: out of home negotiators walk into Q4 holding fresh, half-year, trade-body-published revenue data, while TV buyers hold nothing more recent than Q1 until October.

The most recent verified market figures remain Q1 2026: UK ad investment up 9.3% to £11.7bn, against AA/WARC’s full-year forecast of £50.5bn, up 8.2%, with 2027 put at £53.5bn, up 5.9%. Within that, television is the line that should shape every Q4 conversation. Total TV grew 0.8% in Q1, against a market running at 9.3% and against a full-year television forecast of 3.7% — a forecast that needs a second half no published figure currently supports. Addressable TV grew 15.5% in the same quarter on a 13.6% full-year forecast, which is to say television’s entire forecast growth is carried by addressable while the non-addressable base sits close to flat. That is not a buyer’s argument; it is the industry’s own published table, and it is the strongest evidence available that linear rate inflation this autumn has little underneath it. AA/WARC’s Q2 is not due until October, and Barb’s position is the mirror image: the Q2 Establishment Survey published on 2 September, but the Monthly Viewing Summary still shows a month selector with nothing behind it. Access data, yes; viewing data, no. Every Q4 negotiation between now and October therefore runs on Q1 spend and Q2 access, and the seller knows that as well as the buyer does. Ask the sales house to name, in writing, what changes in the second half to move total TV from 0.8% to 3.7% — then price the answer.

A second independent house has now put a number on the same gap: Madison & Wall’s global forecast, published on 9 September, has television growing 1.3% this year against social on 17.3% and out of home on 5.7%. That is a global figure in dollars and not a UK one, and it should not be read as one — but it sits alongside a UK Q1 outturn of 0.8% on AA/WARC’s own table, against a published UK full-year TV forecast of 3.7%. Two independent measures close to one, one forecast at nearly four. Plan the fourth quarter against the outturns.

One regulatory item belongs in this section because it constrains what can be sold around the biggest UK inventory event of the decade. The Sporting Events Bill [HL] had its Commons second reading and money resolution on 3 September. It is a DCMS government bill sponsored by Baroness Twycross and Lisa Nandy, and it cleared the Lords on 21 July. It is reported to create “restricted advertising zones” in which advertising activity during a specified period would be restricted, with the reported scope extending beyond people physically in a zone to those watching or listening to a broadcast of the event; sponsors can be authorised, and further carve-outs would come by regulation. Every host nation passes an ambush-marketing law, and a clause reported to reach the broadcast audience rather than only the crowd is the part that touches airtime — read the Bill text before pricing against it. The events expected to be designated are the men’s Euro 2028 and, if the bid succeeds, the 2035 Women’s World Cup: between them the single biggest block of UK commercial airtime between now and the end of the decade.

Media buying view

• Re-price 16-34 television plans on the IPA’s 21% figure before autumn money commits, and put the shortfall in writing. The set holds 34% of all-adult commercial media time and 21% among 16-34s, eleven points down in a decade. Buy broadcast for adult efficiency, fund the young-adult gap elsewhere, and stop accepting a co-viewing argument for a brief that has to cross generations — intergenerational reach overlap is 22%, half what it was in 2015.
• Protect the TV budget line in client agreements now, before any switch-off date is announced. On the Arqiva research’s own logic the revenue damage begins with the announcement, not the switch-off — and the mechanism is a budgeting decision made inside agencies and advertisers, which means it is one of the few structural risks in this list you can actually pre-empt in a contract.
• Cap Sky/ITV commitments at twelve months and price the optionality. With Phase 1 not yet opened and no deadline forcing it, the ownership question will not resolve on a schedule you can plan against. Sellers will be pushing volume; short commitments are cheap insurance.
• Weight to BVOD on the profit-to-impression ratio, not on the CPT. Ebiquity’s study for Isba puts BVOD at 21% of TV profit off 15% of impressions — the best ratio in the analysis. It is the one line in the study that argues for moving money rather than defending it, and it does so on profit rather than on reach.
• Confirm your Trade Desk trading and service contacts in writing before committing Q4 money. A 15% global headcount cut landed nine days after a platform rebuild shipped and in the busiest quarter of the year. Get named contacts and an escalation path on paper, and treat the JBP push as the seller’s necessity rather than a favour.
• Gambling clients: the cost stack is loading either side of the quarter boundary. The DCMS consultation on restricting gambling advertising and sponsorship to Gambling Commission-licensed operators closed on 9 September; the proposal would take effect in August 2027, with existing deals permitted to run to the beginning of August 2028. Price 2027 sponsorship inventory currently sold to offshore geo-blocking brands on the assumption it becomes unsellable to them, and treat that run-off window as the commercial planning horizon. Then the cost stack: statutory levy invoices issued 1 September and payable in full by 1 October, Gambling Commission licence fees up 25% on 1 October, and Google’s tightened gambling certification effective Monday 14 September, which reaches agency manager accounts — check yours before the date rather than after. Rebase forecasts on the April 2027 duty rises while you are in there.
• Plan total TV, not just linear. Pair firming linear peak with BVOD and the broadening ad-funded streaming tiers to protect reach and cost-efficiency as linear CPTs rise, and confirm combined delivery against BARB.

Useful source links

Thinkbox — commercial TV marketing body, for effectiveness evidence and audience trends.
BARB — the official source for UK TV audience measurement and final rankings.