Why wasn't ITV on Sky Digital in the early days?
Steve in Pudsey 22 July 2018 6:41am
Some of us just about remember only having three channels
Markymark 22 July 2018 1:46pm
Steve in Pudsey posted:
Indeed, the fourth channel was a neighbouring ITV region !
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Richard posted:
It did apply to UTV, STV, Grampian, Channel, Border, HTV, Meridian and Anglia which weren't owned by Carlton/Granada in 1998 either. C&G had to give their approval for any ITV region to appear on Sky .
For 'ITV' (the network, not the company) to be on satellite required 15+ transponders to be rented, plus conditional access to avoid (in theory) viewing outside of the UK. Back in 1998 the Astra 28.2 birds had Europewide beams. All very expensive from a starting point of virtually no viewers using the platform, plus of course the OnDigital DTT factor.
What changed was Astra 2D in 2001, that had a UK focused beam. By then Sky Digital's penetration
had increased, no CA was required, so the network launched on there. The BBC followed them onto 2D in 2003,
that enabled the Beeb to ditch CA, and (so it goes) the money saved enabled them to launch the English BBC 1 regions on there.
Spencer 22 July 2018 1:59pm
The fourth channel was the video recorder in our house, and there was no fifth button, so when C4 came along (a few years late to our local transmitter, Ridge Hill), we could only watch it by switching the video on and selecting C4 on it.
In over 30 years time we'll probably be reminiscing about the curious oddity of having to switch over to SD for BBC regional news.
Spencer For Hire posted:
I can remember school friends living on a housing estate served by a cable TV system, it was a legacy Rediffusion system I think. The distribution was VHF, so the TVs were colour 625 etc, but with VHF (rather than UHF) tuners. Four buttons, BBC 1 South, BBC 2, Southern ITV, London ITV. On Nov 1st 1982 the signal that distributed London ITV was replaced with C4. Caused outrage (Basingstoke being a London overspill town !)
Perhaps 37 years on and the UKTV/Virgin issue, things haven't really changed !
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Brekkie 22 July 2018 2:26pm
Most people under 30 now would be baffled by there being "outrage" over not having two versions of ITV but it genuinely did give you an extra viewing option for significant periods of the day (typically weekday afternoons, late night and weekend afternoons) and in a way provided a +1/catch up service long before they were even thought about thanks to different regions showing the same shows at different times. Same with C4 and S4C too and especially the 10pm airings of Brookside.
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Stuart 22 July 2018 2:35pm
It's certainly an interesting question for those who weren't around at the time, or are too young to remember it.
The embryonic stages of digital TV were quite badly handled by the regulator (ITC) because of very poor planning by the various governments of the 1980s/90s.
The main contenders for the newly developing platforms (DSat, DTT & to a lesser extent DCab) ended up squabbling like 'rats in a sack', with the result that many companies and their shareholders, lost £Millions in the process.
BSB lost out to Sky because their pockets weren't as deep as "Uncle Rupert's", and couldn't sustain the losses as long. Furthermore, even though BSB had a better quality picture using DMAC, I don't think there was much room for expansion beyond 5 channels on the Marco Polo birds.
ON/ITV Digital had an ultimately flawed business model of poor quality signals, with too many channels on a newly developing transmitter network with too few subscribers. They then made the 'football deal' which also had devastating effects for many clubs when they went bust.
Withholding ITV from the Sky platform probably didn't do them any harm in the short term, as most accessed it through analogue anyway. However, I doubt it had much (if any) effect on the subscriber base for ON/ITV Digital. If anything, it came across as rather petty at the time, IIRC, so not a great PR move.
Of course, in the end, the 'rats in a sack squabble' led us to Freeview.
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Revolution 22 July 2018 2:40pm
And some still have those tellys with the remote that has ITV2 under button 4.
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Revolution posted:
I hope that's a TV needlessly stored in a corner of your loft, and not in your 'man cave', Revolution.
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noggin Founding member 22 July 2018 2:47pm
Didn't ITV launch on Sky with CA though?
How quickly did the regions make it on to Sky. I think some sub-regions have only appeared quite recently, but I assume initially it was a similar situation to the HD and +1 rollout with only the major regions rolled out initially.
noggin posted:
ITV 2 certainly did, and the BBC definitely ditched CA when they moved to 2D, but you might be right about ITV 1 ? If it was FTV it certainly wasn't regionally restricted (as the BBC nations were)
This was first archived on 19 January 2019
BBC North West Tonight, titles - January 2002