ITV has introduced a premium model to its iOS catch-up app ITV Player, making it the first commercial broadcaster to give mobile viewers the option to watch VOD content without ads in exchange for a subscription fee.

The upgrade costs £3.99 per month, and grants access to the last thirty days of catch-up content from ITVs portfolio of channels without ads. It also adds live simulcast streaming of ITV3 and 4 – free users have access to ITV and ITV2.

“The reason PVR (Personal Video Recorder) services like Sky+ are still more popular than VOD is that consumers like to skip the ads,” said James Micklethwait, online product director for ITV, speaking at the Intellect Consumer Electronics Conference this afternoon. “Thats uncomfortable for us, but its true, and we have to find ways to deal with it.”

The Premium subscription looks to be the broadcasters latest attempt at dealing with this, by flipping TVs traditional value exchange – put up with ads, get free content –  on its head. ITV started exploring this concept last December, when it launched the option to rent digital boxsets of its most popular programmes. Since then, though, the digital rental market has changed fairly dramatically with the advent of original programming, a shift which this subscription model echoes.

“Services like Netflix are having a real impact,” said Micklethwait. “Now primetime TV in the UK is competing not just with last weeks primetime, from users timeshifting through VOD or PVR, but with shows like House of Cards.”

According to Micklethwait, seven per cent of ITVs ad revenue in 2012 came from non-linear TV, in all its forms. To date, the ITV Player iOS app has seen over 7m downloads.