Comcast-owned Sky will acquire ITV's media and entertainment divisions in a £1.6 billion deal announced after negotiations that began in November. Sky pays £1.2 billion in cash and transfers Love Productions, maker of *The Great British Bake Off*, while a further £200 million arrives in 2028 contingent on advertising revenue targets. ITV Studios remains independent, though Sky committed £2.1 billion over five years for its content.

ITV is the UK's largest commercial broadcaster with 40 million weekly viewers and 16.5 million monthly digital users. Combined with Sky's footprint, the merged entity will capture roughly 20% of UK in-home viewing time — enough to displace YouTube from the second spot behind the BBC.

YouTube's rise has been broad-based: the BBC reported over-55s now watch twice as much YouTube as they did two years ago, while Gen Alpha defaults to the platform first. Traditional broadcasters view this as an existential threat; the press release explicitly cites competition with "global streaming giants and YouTube" as the rationale for consolidation.

The deal signals that legacy media sees scale as the only viable defense against algorithmic platforms. Whether a combined broadcast-plus-streaming operation can reverse audience drift toward on-demand, ad-supported video remains unproven — but the alternative, fragmentation, looks like guaranteed irrelevance.