Ahead of ITV's annual results next Wednesday March 4, executive chairman Michael Grade has been evaluating a range of options to improve ITV's balance sheet.
The sale of SDN, which was bought for £134m in cash in 2005, is one possibility. Others are understood to include scrapping the dividend and launching a rights issue to raise £300m from investors.
SDN is a profitable business that owns and rents a number of Freeview channels slots to broadcasters including Five, QVC and Discovery.
Reports value SDN at around £200m and suggest the most likely buyer is broadcast services business.
Selling SDN for that price would deliver a capital gain to ITV, which is also considering offloading Friends Reunited -- bought for £175m in December 2005 and now thought to be worth £20m-£40m.
Speculation over SDN follows another dismal run for ITV's share price on the London Stock Exchange. It closed at a new low of 24.5p on Friday, down 10.9% over the space of one week.
's results announcement is also expected to reveal the company will cut 500 jobs in addition to the 1,000 redundancies it made late last year.
In other digital television news, the Financial Times reports today that the BBC Trust is to test whether the BBC and ITV's plans to launch a next generation set-top box with an internet connection are in the interest of licence fee payers and other commercial broadcasters.
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