Internet on the TV was something that has been tried time and time again but no-ones interested.
That late 90s/early 2000's period is littered with failed and long forgotten ideas for the new Internet thing that was rearing it's head. TV companies had ISPs, remote controls with full qwerty keyboards, email and the web appeared on TVs and landline phones and phone boxes.
None of it caught on and all would have been made obsolete by smart phones eventually anyway. Though the smart phone model of apps has now been picked up by the TV manufacturers and kinda resurrected the idea of interacting with your TV. Thought my smart TV still came with a web browser which is next to uselsss
Oh yes, I remember some internet phone thing in the late 90s, in fact I seem to remember it getting a full informercial that was shown every morning before one of the channels (IIRC it was Granada Breeze).
I'm not sure it was that particular one, I'm sure the one I'm thinking of was made by BT! I'm sure the screen was colour too, but I could be misremembering, it's over 17 years ago now! We didn't even have home internet access back then (and our PC at the time was a wonderful 33MHz 486SX with 12MB of RAM)
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.
Quote:
It did yes, OnMail I think was what it was called. If you subscribed you were sent (or could purchase, I can't quite remember) a special folding remote control, that had a qwerty keyboard in it. I can't remember if it was clever enough to provide you with an over the air pop up message that you'd received mail, or whether you had to dial up to check. Either way it used dial up 56kbps phone line, so was pretty clunky. I can't say I sent or received very many messages via it.
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.
Quote:
I cannot recall if there was any sort of web access via an OnDigital box though ...
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.
Students could have been a great area for OnDigital to tap into - compared to Sky and cable. I'm blown away by the fact that OnDigital didn't bother to market to students. Instead of competing against Sky, they could have provided customers with a budget gateway to digital TV. And it's a market that has benefited Freeview and Now TV so well.
I'm not sure it was that particular one, I'm sure the one I'm thinking of was made by BT! I'm sure the screen was colour too, but I could be misremembering, it's over 17 years ago now! We didn't even have home internet access back then (and our PC at the time was a wonderful 33MHz 486SX with 12MB of RAM)
Hmm I don't recall that one. I know the one pictured above was used in the offices of The Apprentice for years.
ONrequest wasn't rebranded at the same time as ONdigital, I presume because the software needed to be patched to reflect the branding. It was eventually rebranded as ITV Select, and looked rubbish compared to its predecessor. All that blue and yellow, gah!
ONgames lived on for a little while too. Eventually they were replaced by Two Way TV, which ran on standard MHEG and was thus rubbish and slow. ONgames ran on a proprietary thing and ran much better.
ONnet became ITV Active but was more or less completely sidelined by the end. The ITV Active homepage stayed up for a long while after ITV Digital closed; I think people were still able to dial up to it for ages too.
ONmail was never rebranded. After ONnet was launched, mere months after ONmail's launch the service was more or less unadvertised, and stopped working through STBs shortly after ITV Digital went under. The onmail.co.uk web portal kept working though, and bizarrely was rebranded a few months later - was it sold!? Sadly the web archive of it hasn't worked: http://web.archive.org/web/20040102122313/https://www.ondigital.co.uk
Most weird of all - in a bizarre act of majorly belated brand defence it appears ITV instructed the administrators to remove the ITV branding posthumously, which resulted in letters being sent out with the company's former name on. The information page from the time has a weird hybrid of ONdigital branding and ITV Digital colours: http://web.archive.org/web/20050308063115/http://www.ondigital-in-liquidation.co.uk/
The ONdigital branding has certainly aged far better than the ITV Digital stuff has, although that said the Monkey & Al adverts were inspired.
ITV Select and OnRequest were also there to compete with Sky Box Office, with about 7 streams (including Adults Only) at the time of closure. Some of the streams, along with ITV Sport Select, would have been better used for bolstering the primary channel lineup. And OnDigital's channel numbering was awful. Text services attaining high EPG positions - bloody stupid. There should have been a general entertainment, kids, news, adult and PPV section, rather than completely mix it all up.
And the closure of CFN lead to bandwidth being used for a barker channel - which was encrypted. Wellbeing as far as it was concerned was also used as a barker after closure. Should have been used instead to host new channels.
I think if ITV Digital had survived a few more years, it could have offered broadband, phone and on demand services (in a similar way to what companies like BT, Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk have been doing for a few years), which would have made it more appealing to consumers, and more likely to have been successful.
OnDigital had email I think? If it did, I wouldn't have attempted to compose on using the UI on those receivers.
It was ok using the remote control keyboards they provided.
A
ONrequest wasn't rebranded at the same time as ONdigital, I presume because the software needed to be patched to reflect the branding. It was eventually rebranded as ITV Select, and looked rubbish compared to its predecessor. All that blue and yellow, gah!
ONmail was never rebranded. After ONnet was launched, mere months after ONmail's launch the service was more or less unadvertised, and stopped working through STBs shortly after ITV Digital went under. The onmail.co.uk web portal kept working though, and bizarrely was rebranded a few months later - was it sold!?
I can't remember exactly how long it was known as ITV Digital for but I don't think the STB software was ever updated to reflect the name change (although I believe there were stickers used to rebrand the outside of the box) and instructions to "contact OnDigital" to receive encrypted channels were hardcoded in. This message also appeared when TopUpTV started as its first incarnation required an OnDigital box.
OnMail did continue with a new owner, but I don't think it was for very long.
