ITVLocal, ITV.com and TheFA.com will screen footage gained by ITV sending cameras to selected early rounds of the competition from August, giving exposure and potential revenue to sides from the lower leagues of the football pyramid. Clubs not chosen will also be invited to submit their own footage.
The BBC, who had held the rights to the FA Cup along with Sky, previously showed a single live match from the first two 'proper' rounds with a smattering of goals from other times on its flagship Match of the Day programme, usually after the weekend's main Premier League action. The BBC would also occasionally follow a small number of clubs in some of the preliminary rounds.
ITV's proposed use of their ITVLocal site, and indeed their site as an extension of the viewing platform, extends areas of their portfolio to an under-represented part of their audience, young males. Their Catch-Up player lags behind the BBC iPlayer in showing mostly soaps and female-focussed shows, while the BBC includes radio, comedy and flagship programmes such as The Apprentice and Dragons' Den.
It is also refreshing to see the country's premier commercial broadcaster making some original moves and beginning to differentiate themselves having taken over an important heritage property such as FA Cup coverage. Their 'The Premiership', which had the audacity to run its flagship highlights programme early evening on a Saturday, was widely panned despite making perfect sense, particularly commercially.
Running football coverage on ITVLocal should open the network up to a wider audience as well as ;giving something back' and hopefully fostering some forgiveness for ITV from fans of lower league football clubs. ITV Digital's spectacular collapse is still blamed for the parlous financial state of a lot of clubs, who had budgeted for TV money which never came.
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