Steve North on Continuing UKTV’s Linear & Streaming Success

UKTV has been serving audiences for more than three decades. With an unrelenting focus on viewers’ tastes and habits, it has curated an offering of drama, comedy and factual programming available on multiple platforms. In 2025, UKTV saw gains in viewership across both its linear channels and streaming services. As its chief content officer, Steve North, tells World Screen, he and his teams remain committed to offering high-quality shows, broadening the genres on offer and drawing more viewers.

WS: What makes UKTV’s offering unique in the U.K. market?
NORTH: UKTV is wholly owned by BBC Studios. We’re a multi-platform broadcaster with seven traditional linear channels, a free streaming service and several FAST channels. We are on most social platforms. So, it’s a multi-faceted business.

UKTV is owned by BBC Studios. Over the last ten years, we have delivered back to the BBC around £750 million across a combination of dividend payments and licensing BBC-commissioned content, so we’re a significant part of the BBC group. And, importantly for us, the combination of the money we invest in original content and the money we give to the BBC group means we play a significant role in supporting the U.K. creative economy and creating fantastic content for audiences in the U.K. and around the world.

What makes us unique is our blend of content, as we can draw from three key areas. The first is the BBC. We have access to the BBC’s phenomenal, decades-long archive of content, which we bring to audiences in the U.K. Alongside that, we have global acquisitions, as well as our originals and commissions.

As our title, UKTV, says, we are very U.K.-focused. There is a U.K.-centric heart to our business and content, which is really important to us, and part of that is being obsessed with audiences. As we’ve grown the business, we’ve kept viewers at the heart of everything we do. That has allowed us to build well-known, recognizable brands. Initially, through our linear channels—be that Dave, Gold or Alibi—we built an understanding of our audience and its needs, and tailored our offerings to them. With U, our on-demand platform, we’ve been very audience-focused, understanding how we bring content from our channels to that singular audience. And through individual programs, whether Bergerac, Pete Wicks: For Dogs’ Sake or Bangers & Cash, we’ve built recognizable brands often with incredibly well-known talent in the U.K. The combination of those things has helped create that uniqueness around UKTV.

WS: When did the streaming service launch, and how has it been received by viewers?
NORTH: We launched our original streaming service, UKTV Play, back in 2014, and rebranded it to U in the middle of 2024. We spent a long time growing the individual channels, each tailored to a specific audience with its own look and feel. We knew that by putting digital at the heart of our strategy, we needed to find a way to bring those individual channels and all their content into one place, under a singular brand that made sense to our consumers. Hence, the brand U and we now use U within our channels, so U&Dave, U&W, U&Yesterday, U&Drama, U&Eden, U&Gold and U&Alibi, to make clear to audiences the proposition about how all these different parts of UKTV fit together.

As for how our streaming service has been received, 2025 was our first full year under the U brand, and our direct-to-consumer views were up 15 percent, our monthly active users were up 23 percent, and overall registrations to the service were up 18 percent. And most importantly, it’s the way those audiences receive the content. So, for example, Bergerac was our biggest show last year, with 2.4 million people watching across both the linear business and the streaming service on U, which is a phenomenal result. We’ve got a number of dramas that have all done over a million views as well. So the way people have reacted to the mix of content, and the way we brought factual, comedy and drama together into one place has been great to see.

The next step is how we continue to grow that. There are a few key ways of doing that. One is about a clear proposition, making sure that audiences understand what we stand for and what they will get from us. Second, is maintaining the quality and the quantity of the brilliant content we have. When we’re looking at content, we’ve got two jobs: keeping our current viewers on U happy whilst bringing in new people. And the third part is about expanding the service’s availability. On January 5, we launched U on the Channel 4 streaming service; it’s a carriage deal we have with Channel 4 to ensure we continue to grow and reach new people with U. We extended distribution throughout 2025 on platforms like Sky Glass, Sky Stream and now on C4 streaming, which is another step in widening that audience. So, we launched in 2014 and rebranded in 2024. The response from our consumers and viewers has been so positive; now we need to continue that moving forward.

WS: In the U.S. and in several other markets, the share of linear viewing is declining, and yet UKTV’s linear viewing has increased.
NORTH: The TV landscape is changing, and we can’t get away from that. But in the U.K., over 80 percent of all viewing still goes to linear channels. When you add the viewing of IP linear channels, it goes up to about 85 percent. So, linear is still strong, but the way people consume TV is changing. We understand that. But what’s important for us is to focus on how we get those two parts of our business working together. We’ve grown our linear and VOD businesses in 2025. How can we use both services to amplify our message, understanding that some people want to watch content on one platform, some on the other, and a whole host in between who watch it on both and move between the two?

So, how do we use the platforms? How do we schedule and release our content? How do we talk about our content in our marketing, our PR and our comms? Are we box-set dropping? Are we doing weekly releases to keep those audiences engaged? We’re finding that when we’re smart, we can grow both parts of our business by making them work together more effectively.

Direct-to-consumer views to our VOD service U are up 15 percent year-on-year. Our linear share of total viewing is up to 4.97 percent in the U.K., and our Share of Commercial Impacts (SOCI) was 9.08 last year, up 3 percent as well year-on-year.

That’s driven by great content—well-known titles that people recognize and watch, as well as exclusive, original content that people will engage with. What we’ve done over the last 12 months is fuel that content and find the best way to manage how we release it across linear and VOD so we can grow both parts of UKTV.

WS: What is the strategy for your original productions?
NORTH: We make content across comedy, factual and drama. They’re the parts of the business that ensure we’re driving growth. Across all three, we have two jobs: keeping our current viewers happy and bringing in new viewers. So, we’re looking at ways we can expand some of those genres. In drama, we’ve had fabulous success this year with a lot of our crime dramas. Bergerac got 2.4 million viewers. But we also have a whole range of shows, including U&Originals The Marlow Murder Club, Sister Boniface Mysteries and I, Jack Wright, alongside premium acquired content such as The Chelsea Detective, Whitstable Pearl and The Art Detectives, which bring in millions of viewers. Bookish, a Mark Gatiss-driven project, sits behind a paywall in the U.K. Although it’s only available to about 50 percent of the viewing public, it drew 1.5 million viewers. These crime dramas do a brilliant job for us. We want to support that while also exploring ways to push those boundaries and expand. For example, Outrageous, a co-commission with BritBox International, had almost a million viewers. It’s a period piece that took us into a new area, brought in new viewers, and we’ll look to do the same this year as we grow and expand our drama offering. We know drama is expensive, and we are absolutely open to working with partners globally to create compelling shows. UKTV can often play a key role in a multilayered funding model.

The second area for this year is a renewed commitment to comedy entertainment, which has been fundamental for UKTV for many years. It’s an increasingly hard territory to work in, but we’ve got a number of new shows currently in development or production, and we’re really excited about them. In factual, we’ve had great success with Pete Wick’s For Dogs’ Sake, Will & Ralf Should Know Better, Guy Martin: Proper Jobs and Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over, working with fantastic talent to drive those projects, often bringing in over half a million viewers for those shows. We’re also looking for new sub-genres, so a bit more of a commitment to true crime this year.

WS: Why is it so important to invest in U.K. creativity?
NORTH: Investing in the U.K. creative economy, of which we are a part, is really important. It creates a positive spiral because the more you invest, the better the shows you get. They perform well, you’re working with great producers and talent, and they come back to you with even better ideas. Those shows go out, do really well, and more people want to work with you. We want to establish UKTV as a place where talent and producers want to come and work. That investment in new original content drives PR, fame and awareness, bringing people to our door. We have that U.K. focus to our business, and having that British sensibility with British stories told by British voices and a British sense of humor is really important to ensuring that we maintain that clear proposition about who we are, what we stand for and the kind of content that we’re going to take to audiences.

WS: How are you using those YouTube and social media platforms?
NORTH: YouTube is the fastest-growing platform, so we are absolutely diving in. We had 750 million social video views last year across all of our social platforms. On YouTube last year, over 4 million hours of our content were watched, up almost 250 percent year-on-year. Increasingly, we’ll have more full episodes of content on those platforms. So whether they’ve historically been seen as marketing platforms, they will be an opportunity for us to house more long-form content. Part of that involves understanding how those platforms work, how our brands work on them, and finding different brands. That means slightly transforming our channel brands on YouTube, from U&Yesterday and U&Dave, to U&Transport and U&Laughs; being a little bit more prescriptive in the way we talk about them, and having U as a brand on YouTube as well.

For example, the series Bangers & Cash sits on YouTube as a channel. We’re up to series 11 now, and it still brings in well over half a million views across linear and VOD. We also have the spin-off, Bangers & Cash: Restoring Classics, and it brings in over half a million viewers every time we bring that series back. So, audiences absolutely adore our YouTube channel featuring Bangers & Cash-related content. So, we need to be audience-focused, understand how audiences search for and watch content on YouTube in a different way, and therefore talk to them in a different way. We will tweak our brands where needed to ensure they work on those individual platforms.