What could have made On/ITV Digital a success?

To be fair there's a lot of confusion surrounding the Carlton channels, as virtually nobody watched them.

The Taste CFN thing was a bit strange, as they announced they were rebranding the channel to "Taste", then all they did was attach the word Taste to some (I don't think even all) of their idents. And I can't remember if even that stuck around.

Taste was the online Sainsbury's brand that Carlton made a deal with for co-branding. The venture lasted little over a year and after Sainsbury's dropped out and closed Taste, Carlton simply decided to close the channel.

All the usual issues with OD such as hardware, channels, reception, piracy etc I would side with and there's no need for me to do do them again, but one thing I do think also greatly contributed to their downfall was failing to realise the markets that existed for them. I had OD in 2000 just after my parents got Sky Digital. The reason? For the past couple of years I'd had my own analogue satellite setup in my bedroom and I used to share the viewing card with my parents as analogue cards would work in any box. Once they went to digital this wouldn't work any more. Even though I was 18 by then I couldn't get my own free box & dish from Sky because it was one per house and the 'rents had already taken that up, Sky didn't at that point (nor for several years after) operate any proper multiroom setup, and the hardware was still too new to go down the route of picking up a secondhand setup and just subscribing. So I went with OnDigital as the only affordable way to still have more than basic analogue channels in my room.

I then took that setup to uni with me and in halls had multichannels in my room whereas everyone else in my block only had 4 channels.

In these circumstances, it was OD or nothing. And it couldn't have just been me. Yet did OD ever market to that demographic? Did they go to student fairs selling £80 prepaid boxes to get Sky One and MTV in your room to students which had just got their loan payments? Nope, nothing. All their advertising was based on taking Sky on directly, and that was never going to work.


Indeed it was called OnMail, and not even 56K - On Digital boxes had a 14.4K modem in them! It was actually a pretty good system for the time. Unfortunately it was made obsolete in 2000 once OnNet launched as that had it's own email system built in (that and by then it was very common to have internet access on your computer). I got to play with it in late 2000 by which time they were giving away the OnMail packs for free, IIRC it cost £29.99 to buy until then. There was no subscription charge for the service, but the dialup phone number used did charge.

Although it was a very long time ago, ISTR that it did pop up a message on screen when you had a new mail, but I don't think it was over the air, I'm sure this feature only worked if you were connected anyway. This wasn't that big a deal at the time anyway as this was long before always-on internet connections and so it was accepted that you needed specifically to check for email yourself, rather than rely on being told when it had come.

The software for this was actually pretty good and quite nippy as it predated MHEG and was running natively on the hardware, it showed that the boxes didn't have to be terrible when they were running apps actually designed for the native hardware, it was only really when everything moved over to MHEG which the hardware wasn't strong enough to do properly that OD boxes attained their particularly legendary sluggishness.


There was On Net, as stated before. This though was a dedicated box containing a 56K modem and was basically just a branded version of similar internet-on-TV products which existed at the time. It had it's own scart output and although the connection instructions showed you looping this through the OnDigital box to make use of a button on the keyboard which let you switch between TV and Internet, this simply activated the switching pin on the scart connector, it didn't actually rely on anything in the main box and could be used independently of it. As with other similar products, this arrived too late to receive much uptake; even back then it couldn't keep up with technologies which were commonplace on PC based browsing and so was decidedly inferior. It also was still a chargeable dialup connection (on top of a subscription fee) in an era when most people by then had moved on to unmetered dialup on a computer.

It was a pointless venture. In the same sense as Granada's venture with Boots, Wellbeing. Don't forget Shop! which was between Granada and Littlwoods.

I think the powers that be hoped that there'd have been more co-operation between broadcasters and retailers, via interactive TV. It died a death.

And interactive TV never really took off either. The sort of stuff they envisaged people doing through their TV is done with smartphones & tablets instead. And is a lot less clunky than using a remote control. Who does banking and shopping though their TV, like they were telling us we would in the late 90s/early 00s?

To be fair the concept of it wasn't a bad one, the implementation of it was a different matter. We switched to NTL Digital in 2000, interactive cable didn't require a phone line connection (Sky and On did) and there were plenty of services. Problem with it was that it was so painfully slow and clunky. A lot of services either crashed or ceased quite quickly.

I remember there used to be Open on Sky, which wasn't owned by Sky initially. But that soon became Sky Active and became more of a gaming platform. The interactive button on most Sky remotes is as defunct as the Box Office one.

I'm sure more people would have done it if the experience was better. The technology wasn't there yet.

While some of the more mundane services like you mentioned never took off, I always remember the Sky Active games being a big thing whenever I went round to someone who had Sky Digital.

The only one I remember playing was the Playjam "Beat The Meat". And even then is was mostly sniggering at the masturbation innuendo in it.

Just to add to this - been researching further and it turns out the deal was announced in September 2000, but the launch of Taste.co.uk and the rebrand of Taste CFN didn't actually happen until May 2001. So the venture was even shorter-lived than I thought, as it collapsed by August of that year. That's three months between the rebranding of the channel and ending of the joint venture altogether. It appears Carlton were given back full ownership of the TV channel, but as I said, decided it wasn't worth continuing and closed it down. UK Food launched soon after, to capitalise I imagine.

Worth remembering though that at the time mobile phones were still very much in their infancy, a tablet was something you got from the doctors while a Nokia was about as smart as phones got.

"Interactive" and "Digital" though are two words which have been thrown about so many times over the last 20 years or so as television evolved. I think every Olympics since 2004 has been dubbed "the first digital Olympics".

Still, the idea of doing those things through your TV never really took off, even before smartphones and tablets became common.