At one stage, Carlton was up 2.2% to 253.5p and Granada rose 4.3% to 156.5p as the long-awaited deal looked likely.
The deal means that viewers in Sky homes will now no longer have to unplug their satellite service and switch to their traditional TV aerial to be able to tune into ITV favourites such as Coronation Street and Emmerdale.
BSkyB was down 2.2% on news of the deal, which will see it broadcasting ITV1, ITV2 and ITV Sport and end a bitter row between the broadcasters.
The ITV companies have been in on-off negotiations with Sky for some time. The talks were becoming increasingly heated as the ITV partners argued that Sky was asking too high a price for carriage of their services.
It has also been said that the ITV companies were preventing ITV from being broadcast on Sky because they hoped it would encourage people to sign up to their own digital platform, ITV Digital. This plan, however, failed to pay off.
The position of ITV was weakened further as the platform's flagship channel ITV1 was losing audience share in Sky homes, which it could ill afford to do against the background of the advertising downturn.
The deal is good news for ITV, which could have been on course to lose a further £200m in advertising revenues if it had been forced to broadcast via the Astra satellite system, independently of Sky.
Meanwhile, cable company Telewest saw its shares rise 7% today, as rival NTL announced it had passed the 100,000 mark for broadband subscribers, giving cable a 70% share of the market.
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