Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
The Clymo Brief: A decade of digital TV
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Ah, where would we be without glorious, multi-channel digital TV? I know I’d soon go stir crazy without access to an infinite loop of documentaries and episodes of How It’s Made. However, I must confess I’m a relative latecomer to this entertainment revolution.

It’s because I lived in a communications black hole at my old address. I’m not joking – I couldn’t even get Channel 5. It wasn’t like I was living on a desert island. The postcode was in a big town on the south coast, but just out of reach of the analogue TV transmitters.

I couldn’t get Freeview either and, although cable existed in my street, it didn’t run up to the flat (a distance of around three metres tops). I even offered to pay the cable company extra to put a length of co-ax up the garden path, but they refused.
Judging by the amount of satellite dishes on the outside of the building I can only guess everyone else sided with Sky. But do you remember when there was another option? Something called ONdigital?

Lavish launch
It’s now ten years to the week since the emergence of this, the first digital terrestrial pay TV package. Armed with a £40 million marketing budget, the service was announced on July 28th 1998 and ONdigital unveiled its shiny new network in November of that year. But despite lots of fireworks and a lavish launch party headed up by Ulrika Jonsson it was all downhill from there.

Over the next four years, the ONdigital saga ran like a badly produced soap opera. It all seemed such a great idea at the time. BSkyB with its Sky Digital satellite service was the big competitor, but ONdigital didn’t need a satellite or cable connection, just a set top box. (Rather amusingly, some cheapskates still use these to receive Freeview today.)
Losing ground
But aggressive marketing and cutthroat pricing from the Sky Digital camp made the packages offered by ONdigital look poor value by comparison and it started losing ground almost immediately. Sky had cannily started giving new customers a free dish and digibox.

A nice man would even come round and plug it all in for you to make sure your picture was crystal clear. Oh, and there were around 200 channels. ONdigital offered about 20, the same as Sky’s older analogue service.

I remember a work colleague who’d been one of the first to sign up for ONdigital smugly invited me round for a look. What a fiasco. The signal was dismally weak and the box kept crashing. Still, at least there was a glossy TV guide to leaf through while I waited for him to get something decent on the screen. I left him to it after the popcorn ran out.
After less than two years and a miserly take-up, Carlton and Granada rebranded ONdigital as ITV Digital, and snapped up the rights to the Football League for its new ITV Sport Channel.

Cue another huge marketing campaign and an extraordinary series of telly ads. Yes, who can forget the hilarious antics of that comedy monkey? Rubbish - although his little woollen sidekick should really have gone on to bigger and better things.

Dwindling numbers
Doubtless the pair did better out of the deal than ITV Digital. Weighed down by the immense cost of the Football League contract and crippled by dwindling subscription numbers, the broadcaster went belly up in March 2002.
It wasn’t just bad news for ITV Digital – it also proved catastrophic for many lower division football clubs who’d been expecting boom times thanks to the Football League deal.

By the end of April 2002, the pay-for TV service finally bit the dust and during October that same year Freeview was born. Remaining subscribers were asked nicely to hand back their set-top boxes. They didn’t.

New services
Since then we’ve seen Sky dominate while doing battle with the likes of Virgin Media to stay ahead of the game. Other exciting developments from the likes of BT and Top Up TV are also in the offing.

Freesat, the new service launched by the BBC and ITV currently offers 66 free TV channels, a few of which are in high definition. Does that make me feel any better about paying the licence fee? Erm, no. Freesat from Sky, meanwhile, allows you to get more than 200 free TV channels. Go figure.
So what of the digital future? Well, things are sure to advance even more rapidly as we speed ever closer to 2012, when analogue is supposed to be finally switched off here in the UK.

It’s all a far cry from telly circa 1982 when I was living out in the sticks, desperate to see The Prisoner on the then newly launched Channel 4. My picture was so snowy that I could only just make out the lurid sixties fashions through all that analogue fog. Boy, we’ve come a long way since then, that’s for sure!


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Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft. Microsoft is the publisher and owner of MSN Tech & Gadgets.