Recent developments...how it is responding to the 'new media' age

With more channels to choose from, digital television is increasingly putting pressure on the ITV network's ratings and advertising revenues. This has led a number of requests by franchisees to reduce the networks public service commitments.[citation needed] For example, most recently, ITV has shown interest in reducing its children's output.[citation needed] Critics of the broadcaster have also pointed to the reduction in commitment to regional programming and presentation.[citation needed]
Perhaps the most controversial change was the scrapping of the flagship late evening news programme, News at Ten in 1999, replacing it with a later, irregular scheduled and shorter news bulletin. ITV argued that the move would enable it to make the evening schedule more diverse and flexible, allowing them to show feature length films without a news break. News at Ten was brought back in January 2008, With just 3.8 million viewers compared to 4.9 million viewers who watched the BBC News at Ten.
Such actions on the part of ITV together with a move to more populist programming has led to many commentators to accuse ITV of 'dumbing down'.[citation needed] In its defence, ITV does continue to show its major strengths in the fields of sports coverage and drama productions, and the production of 'high-brow' programming such as The South Bank Show has continued. However its long-standing commitment to strong current affairs programming has diminished with the ending of productions such as World in Action (Granada), This Week (Rediffusion/Thames), First Tuesday (Yorkshire Television) and Weekend World (LWT) and their replacement with populist shows such as Tonight.
The threat to "Channel 3" advertising revenues has also led franchisees to increasingly diversify their businesses. Most notably, ITV plc owns five additional digital-only television channels, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, CITV Channel and Men & Motors and also time-shift channels of ITV2 and 3. This diversification has also led to numerous notable failures such as ITV Digital in 2002, which was owned by ITV plc's predecessors Carlton and Granada.