Introduction
The UK's most-watched commercial broadcaster
ITV is the UK’s most watched commercial broadcaster. With an audience of tens of millions across linear TV and its digital platform ITVX, ITV sits at the centre of the UK's sporting and entertainment culture. ITVX is the streaming home of ITV's content - from drama and reality to live sport and has become one of the UK's most downloaded apps.
ITVX will be one of the country's primary destinations for fans following the FIFA World Cup 2026
The Challenge
Keeping fans engaged beyond the broadcast - inside the app, for every match.
Live sport is one of the most powerful drivers of app engagement, but the window is narrow. A match lasts ninety minutes. The broadcast holds the viewer. The challenge for ITVX was how to deepen that engagement - giving fans something to participate in, not just watch, without asking them to leave the native app experience.
With the World Cup representing the single biggest moment in ITV's 2026 broadcast calendar, the stakes were clear. ITV wanted every fan watching an England game - or any World Cup fixture - to be able to predict scores, build their team, vote in polls, and interact with match content in real time, all within ITVX itself. The experience needed to feel native, load instantly under extreme traffic conditions, and be fully automated so that the editorial team could focus on the match, not the technology.
The scale requirement was significant. At peak - an England match at a critical stage of the tournament - up to 2.5 million concurrent users would be on ITVX simultaneously. The interactive engagement layer needed to hold steady throughout.
Selecting a Partner
A decade-long relationship
ITV and Monterosa have worked together since 2016, a partnership that has grown in depth and ambition with each successive activation. For World Cup 2026, ITV turned again to Monterosa - not just because of the track record, but because of what the platform could now offer.
Where previous activations had required manual configuration and editorial oversight for each element, the World Cup engagement layer needed to be substantially automated. OPTA match data would need to drive element creation and locking without human intervention.
Video highlights from Brightcove needed to sit inside the experience directly, without routing fans out to a separate player. And the entire experience needed to be embedded natively inside the ITVX WebView, matching the ITVX design language so precisely that fans would never feel they had left the app.
Monterosa's platform met each of these requirements, bring in-built capability, with a willingness to extend the platform where ITVX-specific behaviour was needed. ITV also valued the live match support capability - Monterosa's team would be on hand throughout the tournament, monitoring every fixture in real time.
Solution
A fully automated Match Centre and AI-powered fan experience, built into ITVX
The centrepiece of the World Cup 2026 engagement is the Match Centre - a live, interactive experience embedded inside the ITVX app for every tournament fixture. Fans open a match and find a scrollable feed alongside the live broadcast: a live scoreboard and commentary feed driven automatically from the OPTA data feed, plus a sequence of interactive elements timed to the rhythm of the match.
Before kick-off, fans can submit their Score Predictor - picking the final score for the match. The element is created automatically by Monterosa's Feed Connector when OPTA detects a new World Cup fixture, and locks at kick-off without any editorial action required. Fans can also build their best XI through the Team Selector, with squad data pulled directly from OPTA and injected into the element automatically. During the match, polls, quizzes, and editorial highlights from Brightcove sit in the feed, authored by the ITV team in Studio.
Between matches, the Event Centre gives fans a World Cup hub to explore - highlights, articles, polls, and content cards with direct calls to action to add shows to their ITVX watchlist or set reminders for upcoming fixtures.
These ‘Add to List’ and ‘Remind’ Me’ features are built as custom elements, passing a bridge message to the native ITVX app so fans can act on content without leaving the experience.
The solution also includes an ‘Ask AI’ feature, which Google Gemini generates football insights to fans as a native FanKit card during live matches.
“The new LFC Match Centre has been fantastic in enabling our global fanbase to celebrate the climax to an amazing season in the club's history. Having the flexibility and speed to manage content in real-time has delivered another level of matchday experience, both for our in-house teams and, most importantly, for the fans. The new Match Centre has quickly become an important driver in the club's long-term fan registration strategy.”
Andy Fletcher
VP Product
