Ally Pally on a December evening: the walk-on music drops, the hall is a wall of fancy dress, and somewhere in the crowd a man dressed as a banana is checking his phone to see whether the afternoon’s Players Championship stream has finished uploading.
That is roughly where darts viewing sits in 2026. The sport has never been on more screens, and it has never been more spread out across them.
Sky has the marquee nights. ITV has the free-to-air slate. The PDC’s own service carries the floor events, and a handful of bookmakers stream bits of everything to their customers. If you want the whole season rather than whatever happens to be on, you need to know who holds what.
Sky Sports still owns the big nights
The spine of the calendar is on Sky. In February 2025 Sky and the PDC extended their partnership to 2030, a deal covering more than 60 days of exclusive live darts a year: the World Championship, the Premier League, the World Matchplay, the Grand Slam, the World Grand Prix and the World Cup of Darts.
Sky has shown PDC darts since 1993, so none of that is new. The scale of it is. Premier League nights run on Thursdays from February to May, and the majors fill the autumn.
The World Championship is where most casual viewers arrive. The 2026/27 edition runs from Friday 11 December to Sunday 3 January, and for the first time it moves into Alexandra Palace’s Great Hall, which holds more than 5,200 people against the old room’s 3,200.
There are 128 players in the draw and 180,000 tickets going through the ballot. Every session is live on Sky Sports, and the app’s clips mean you rarely miss a nine-darter even if you were asleep for it.
ITV4 and ITVX carry the free slate
If you do not pay for Sky, you still get a decent chunk of the year for nothing. ITV renewed with the PDC to 2028 and runs the World Masters, the UK Open, the European Championship, the Players Championship Finals and the World Series of Darts events and Finals on ITV4, with everything simulcast on ITVX.
That is a serious block of televised darts, and it includes the UK Open weekend in Minehead in March, which is the closest the PDC gets to the FA Cup.
The catch is scheduling. ITV4 coverage tends to be split across afternoon and evening sessions, and the app is where you will end up for the sessions that clash with whatever else the channel is running. Set reminders in ITVX rather than trusting the TV guide.
PDCTV picks up the floor events
Most of the PDC season never touches a television at all. The Players Championship series, the European Tour qualifiers and the Development Tour are played across several boards in halls with barely a crowd, and they decide a lot of the ranking points.
PDCTV, the PDC’s own subscription service, streams these live with multiple boards running at once, which is how darts obsessives ended up watching a leisure centre on a Tuesday afternoon from a laptop.
Two things to know before subscribing. The televised majors are geo-blocked on PDCTV in the UK, because Sky and ITV hold those rights, so you get highlights afterwards rather than the live feed.
And the multi-board format only earns its money if you actively pick a board. Left alone it shows you whichever match the producer fancies, which is not always the one with the teenage qualifier averaging 105.
This is where the second-screen habit we have written about in football has quietly taken over darts too. A phone with live scores from the other boards, a tablet with the stream, the TV for whatever Sky or ITV is showing that night. Our piece on how the second screen changed the way fans follow football applies almost word for word.
Bookmaker streams are the wildcard
The fourth screen, and the one the broadcasters would rather you did not think about, is the bookmaker app. Several UK-licensed operators buy streaming rights to selected PDC events and show them to customers who either hold a funded account or have placed a bet in the previous 24 hours.
Which events, and which operators, changes from tournament to tournament, so a rundown of the UK darts bookmakers compared on streaming and in-play coverage is worth five minutes before you assume your usual app will carry the World Grand Prix.
Treat it as a viewing option with strings attached rather than a free stream. The pictures are small, sometimes a few seconds behind the broadcast, and they exist to keep you in the app.
You need to be over 18, and it is worth checking the operator on the Gambling Commission’s public register before opening an account; a company that is not on it cannot legally take bets from Great Britain. GambleAware’s free helpline is 0808 8020 133 if the watching starts to feel like something else.
Is anyone actually watching all this?
Yes, and in odd ways. The 2026 World Championship final peaked at 2.5 million on Sky Sports, down on the 3.1 million peak for Littler’s first title the year before. Yet total viewing across the tournament was up 13 per cent year on year and set a new record, and it is more than double what it was four years ago.
Fewer people were glued to one final; more people dipped in across the fortnight and across devices. I suspect the Great Hall move and the earlier start will stretch that pattern further this winter.
The one date to circle is the final itself. Sunday 3 January is the first time the World Championship decider has fallen on a Sunday, which at least solves the problem of the Monday morning after.