STV Player adding 270 hours of content
December 22, 2020
STV Player has announced five new deals which will see over 120 hours of new content being added to the free UK-wide service in time for Christmas, and an additional 150 hours coming early in the new year.
STV’s VoD offering – which is the exclusive home of the Channel 3 network schedule in Scotland and offers a wide variety of Player-only programming to viewers across the UK – will be boosted by 18 new films from Reel One, including festive offerings A Christmas Hero and You Can’t Fight Christmas. Ten-part Canadian-American police drama Detective McLean, also distributed by Reel One, is AVoD-exclusive to the STV Player in the UK.
In addition:
- A new deal with Espresso Media sees true crime series The Moors Murders joining the Player, alongside intriguing singles What Happened to Holly Bartlett? and My Dad’s On Death Row.
- The Straits, a 10 x 60’ Australian drama series starring Succession’s Brian Cox, will also be available to enjoy over Christmas as part of a deal with DCD Rights.
- 60 hours of new content comes courtesy of French distributor Balanga. A Tale of Two Thieves – a film exploring the Great Train Robbery of 1963 – leads the new additions, along with science series On the Edge and Bon Appetit: Gerard Depardieu’s Europe, which sees the Hollywood star embarking on a gastronomic tour of the continent.
- In January, Beyond Rights will bring an array of factual titles to the STV Player for 2021, including multiple seasons of true crime series Deadly Women, Cause of Death Unknown and Behind Mansion Walls, as well as reality formats Mother of the Bride and A Week to My Wedding.
The new shows will bring the number of hours of Player-only content available on the platform to over 2,750. During a year of accelerated growth for the STV Player, online viewing increased by 82 per cent from January to October (VoD viewing +87 per cent; live simulcast viewing +71 per cent), compared with the same time period in 2019.
Richard Williams, Managing Director of Digital at STV, said: “As 2020 draws to a close we’re delighted to have signed another wave of new content deals, which will bring even more high quality free TV from around the world into our viewers’ living rooms this Christmas. With audience habits rapidly changing, our strategy this year has focused on bolstering our catalogue of Player-only programming. The sheer wealth of content that we now offer, along with the fact that the STV Player has launched UK-wide on Sky, Freeview Play, Virgin Media and a plethora of other major platforms, has really elevated our position in the UK VoD landscape. I’m looking forward to building on that progress in 2021.”
The STV Player app is available on web, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, Kindle tablets, Freeview Play, Apple TV, YouView, Samsung, Freesat, Fire TV, Virgin Media, Sky+, Sky Q and Sky Go, Roku, Now TV, and via Chromecast.