Interactive services memories

Interactive services have come a long way since the launch of digital in 1998 20 years ago it went from tons of services to just a handful

But what are your memories

Mine will it had to be sky active and the reason why is because I accidentally run up a huge telephone bill playing on sky gamestar and then later sky games

If by 'come a long way' you mean 'virtually disappeared'


Interactive was one of those things like 3D that the broadcasters told us we wanted, but in reality we didn't. In the end the Internet and later smart phones rendered the whole thing pointless


The only interactive thing I used and enjoyed was the play along Banzai game in the very early days of E4 (in fact it started on the channels first night) a great use of the technology and worked on terrestrial without a phone line or anything

Bring back Bamboozle.

Two things...

Well, I had one of these monsters


Which flipped open to reveal a keyboard for ONmail and other interactive applications ONdigital offered (and none of which I can remember using)


The onMail app could have been great, but given that many homes didn’t have an always-on internet connection and the ONdigital box had to dial up the internet (which it managed at something like 22kbps) it meant you had to check if you had mail, rather than receiving any sort of push notification. ONmail was apparently launched in March 2000, which seems quite late to me for a dial up text only email service. I think I used it a bit once or twice, then didn’t bother anymore, because if I was dialling up the internet for something, I’d check my emails then anyway.

ONrequest was a pay per view movies system, and I think I may have used that once or twice. Again, that needed to make a phone call to the internet to log the charge and you had to view at a certain time, so it wasn’t really on request at all.

https://media.onhistory.co.uk/documents/ondigital0028.pdf

Beehive Bedlam and Bamboozle were resurrected on smart phones, don't think Beehive is still available though. I remember playing that on Sky and then rediscovering it year later and couldn't believe how clunky it was. A TV remote is such a rubbish way of controling a game


I went for jobs at Open.. and Two Way TV back in the early 2000's. Am very glad I got neither

I won an 'Open....' keyboard once after my letter to the Sky customer magazine was declared 'letter of the month'.

I did once order a Domino's pizza using the service on Sky Active. The process of navigating all the menus to select my order and entering my address/card details, etc., took so long I could probably have just gone to the local shop and bought the raw ingredients to make a pizza myself.

My local Currys were selling them off for 97p in about 2007. I regret buying one, but only slightly. (I wonder if they're even compatible with Sky+/HD boxes?)

Absolutely correct. Even with the limitations of dial up Internet at the time, the services were terribly slow. I remember trying to look at Dixons or maybe The Link on Open and it just taking an absolute eternity to navigate various pages and even then the full online shop seen on a PC browser was not available (or if it was it was difficult to navigate to the product you were looking for). It was far easier to just boot your Windows 98 PC and dial in to your Freeserve account than use Open.

Only the games kept the service going in later years it seemed.

How long did Sky News Active last? They certainly pushed it up until about 2006 or so with its eight mini-screens of looped content. The highlight being Election 2005 with a live unedited stream of the studio gallery.

I remember ordering pizzas from Dominos via my Sky box back in the day... ISTR that the modems in them weren't the fastest.

I think, though I could be wrong, that it lasted until about 2011/2012. It was certainly gone by the time I got Sky in 2014.

This pretty much sums up my memories: