Susanna Reid will front new ITV breakfast show Good Morning Britain after the broadcaster confirmed on Monday it was dumping ill-fated Daybreak after less than four years on air.
ITV has turned to Reid, who presents rival morning show Breakfast on BBC1, to present the new show alongside Ben Shephard, Charlotte Hawkins and Sean Fletcher.
Hawkins has been hired from Sky News, where she fronts the Sunrise breakfast programme alongside Eamonn Holmes. Shephard is a presenter on ITV and Sky Sports and will be a familiar face to ITV breakfast viewers as a former presenter of GMTV.
The fourth face of the new show, Sean Fletcher, is a previous news and sport presenter across the BBC, including Breakfast, and is currently on Sky Sports.
ITV said Good Morning Britain would launch "later this year" and would put "engaging, news driven content" at its heart.
Reid's departure is a big blow for the BBC. She is the star name of its Breakfast programme which regularly has more than double the audience of Daybreak.
The presenter has long been a rising star at the BBC, her stock rising further when she made the final of BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing, although she was criticised by fellow contestant Fiona Fullerton for her "relentless PR campaign" during the course of the show.
Daybreak presenter Aled Jones has been dropped from its weekday lineup, moving to a new weekend show, Weekend. His co-host, Lorraine Kelly, will switch back to her old 8.30am weekday slot.
In turning to Reid, it is a case of history repeating itself for ITV. The broadcaster hired BBC presenters Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley to present Daybreak after it axed GMTV in 2010.
But despite launching in a blaze of publicity the show never took off, with even Chiles later describing it as a "crock of shit".
ITV Director of Daytime, Helen Warner, said: "Our overriding aim is to continue to improve our breakfast programming for our viewers and we have been working for some time behind the scenes developing the next chapter of our offering.
"Engaging, news driven content is our number one priority and will be at the heart of everything we do on Good Morning Britain."
Reid was reported to have been offered £1m by ITV to change channels, but sources said the estimates were excessive.
However, she is sure to earn far more than the £250,000 she is currently believed to be paid at the BBC is she moves to ITV.
Reid become the main presenter of BBC1's Breakfast programme in 2012.
The Breakfast programme moved out of London to the corporation's new BBC North HQ in Salford two years ago but Reid declined to make the switch full time, commuting from her London home.
Critics have said the BBC1 programme has struggled to attract big name guests onto its sofa when it moved out of the capital, but it has not dented its ratings.
ITV recently completed a review of its ill-starred breakfast show Daybreak, which has stumbled through various incarnations and presenter line-ups since replacing GMTV three-and-a-half years ago, but still trails far behind its BBC1 rival in the ratings.
Chiles and Bleakley left after only 15 months after Daybreak's launch and the programme, which has been through four editors in less than four years, regularly has less than half the audience which tunes into BBC1's Breakfast.
Daybreak typically averages around 600,000 viewers against BBC1 Breakfast's 1.6 million.
ITV's announcement on Monday follows weeks of speculation that Reid would switch channels, and a warning from a former ITV daytime chief that Reid was not the answer to its breakfast woes.
"If they go for Susanna Reid I think they will be wasting a lot of money again," said Dianne Nelmes, who launched ITV's This Morning and left the broadcaster in 2008.
"Until they get the content right it doesn't matter who they bring in, it's not going to work. Changing the presenters isn't going to solve any of this," she told Radio 4's Media Show last month.
"It's not because I have anything against Susanna Reid, I'm sure she is a very good presenter and she was a big star on Strictly Come Dancing. I would not take on a new presenter – I would leave the team as it is and I would concentrate on spending the money on getting a couple of really powerful people to work with me to sort out the content."
Nelmes said former Daybreak presenters Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley had been "scapegoated" and that the programme had too much showbiz and not enough news. "It has to have a balance," she said.
Another former ITV daytime chief, Liam Hamilton, said ITV bosses needed more patience. "The GMTV launch was not a triumph, it was troubled as well," he told the Radio 4 programme. "One of the distressing things is that they haven't learned some of those lessons that even TV-am before it rather painfully learned."
He added: "The content is the more material issue rather than who is in front of the camera. Concentrate on the content, try with your team to have a bit of fun, you have got to create a bit of atmosphere on and off the camera, and viewers will respond."
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