What could have made On/ITV Digital a success?

The main problem they had was with the prepaid boxes - although you were supposed to be buying the subscription and merely being lent the box on free rental the reality is these were just sold with no details taken and no ID required from the store just like anything else, you did have to call to register with OD but again they would just activate the viewing card on the call and accept whatever details were taken with no checks done at all and no way of telling when people moved.


Their systems for tracking and collecting boxes were also extremely poor. When my original prepaid subscription ran out (which I had a Philips box on) I let it lapse in order to register as a monthly subscriber to get a new Pioneer box. Although they stated my original Philips box would be collected it never was, and they never deactivated the viewing card; I passed the setup on to my sister and it carried on running right through to ITV Digital's collapse without a peep from them!


And with my new Pioneer, one evening it appeared to have tuner failure, displaying 'no signal' (well, a red square because that's what they did!) on every channel even though everything was connected. I called customer services and they agreed to swap the box. About an hour after the call I realised this was because the dist amp in the attic had blown a fuse but I was too embarrassed to call back and tell them and decided to let the box swap happen anyway. When my new box was delivered I tried to pass the old one back to the delivery guy but he said he had no collection paperwork and couldn't take the old one away (just as well since the new one was a second hand Pace box).

So in the end I ended up in possession of 3 boxes and a renewed prepaid subscription for free - and this was an address where they knew the whereabouts of everything!

The administrators stating that they would intend to take legal action to recover the boxes if people refused to return them when they didn't have the capital to bring such proceedings (would need to be a county court claim and bailiff instructions as this would be a simple breach of contract claim) or even know where half these boxes were was laughable.

But again probably another reason why they collapsed.

I was really jealous of people who had sky/cable/ITV Digital back then but now I don't really think I missed much.

I was really jealous of people who had sky/cable/ITV Digital back then but now I don't really think I missed much.

It depended on what you wanted to watch and how quickly you cared about watching it. The big player which subscription TV has (and still has now) is sport, beyond that most things would make their way onto analogue terrestrial eventually, but you were in for a long old wait, far longer than you are these days.

The big UK-comissioned dramas and the big soaps were obviously still on the main 4 channels, just like they still are now.

Where having Sky really came into it's own is with the US imports. Series like The Simpsons did not get aired outside of Sky One until 1996, similarly all the other big US series of the day (ER, Friends, the various Star Treks etc) were often aired on terrestrial channels several years behind the airing on Sky. The archive channels like UK Gold were also far more useful in the day seeing as in those days there weren't so many repeats on the 4 terrestrial channels because of all the new content to fit onto it.

When it came to films - the average 'ITV Movie Premiere' in the mid-90's would be for a film 3 or 4 years old, whereas it would have been on Sky Movies the same year it was released.

Genre-specific channels like Discovery, MTV and kids channels also got you far more of a given genre then you'd ever get on terrestrial channels and were good if you felt like something other than Corrie or Eastenders to watch in the evening.

This didn't really start to change until around 1999/2000, which sadly was the very time OD was trying to raise it's profile.

Freeview arguably had little worth watching on it until several years after launch, and of course now you'll get a US import on a free channel generally within a year (sometimes even a few months) of the airing on a pay channel, making it far less of a big deal to see it first on Sky. It also should be remembered that Sky's pricing used to be far more reasonable (even allowing for inflation). Right now I would agree with you, I don't subscribe to anything any more, but back in the day I was glad to have pay TV, it did add an awful lot.

Yep agree with this too. NOW TV is pretty decent. You know, if you try to cancel it they will give you a discount for a few months. Little tip there

Yep agree with this too. NOW TV is pretty decent. You know, if you try to cancel it they will give you a discount for a few months. Little tip there