What could have made On/ITV Digital a success?

Either that or Granada Breeze, which continued on NTL for a good year after it finished everywhere else.


It wasn't the Nordic feed, it used some of their presentation elements but that's it.

A firm announcement of DSO early into the DTT programme would have helped. A major incentive knowing that Analogue was time limited would have spurred sales of the kit and led to commercial service take-up. Viewers content with the 4/5 channel service could do nothing which majorly restrained the platform.

There was a firm commitment to DSO with a provisional date of 2010. It wasn't plausible to do it much earlier than that and nobody is going to rush out and spend £200 on a STB for a deadline a decade or so away.

EDIT - Just found several documents I made at the time (don't know what for) with full channel listings between around 2000-2005. This covers all the 'eras' of DTT - On Digital, ITV Digital, the wilderness time after ITVD collapsed but before Freeview started, and early Freeview.


Does anyone remember how long this lasted? I wonder if it actually lasted until Arqiva took over?

I think it was to placate Cable & Wireless for some reason. The relationships between cable companies and channels in the 90s were strange, with the cable companies throwing money at content to try and get enough subscribers to fund the huge outlay they'd made on infrastructure (the book "L?VE TV - Tellybrats and Topless Darts" describes this well)... it's not so unusual that C&W would have had a contract to be provided with TCC that said they had to give a certain amount of notice before coming off air.

In South Wales, we had a channel on NTL called ONTV which was contained local news (in text form) and advertising - does anyone remember this?

Looked though some old Digital Spy threads it appears at some point it moved to 52 and disappeared in September 2003.

After Breeze closed on Sky and ITV Digital, it continued for at least up to three months on cable. By the end of April 2002 it was pulled off air.

I remember the TCC that ran between April and September 1998, I thought at first it was the Nordic version as it seemed to be on at the same time. However it wasn't uncommon that there were times the channel wasn't on air at all, or if tapes were on pause or jammed for that matter. From what it sounded like, it probably was played out by CWC, possibly similar to the way The Box used to work back I the old days.

I believe NTL was the last platform that ran Granada Breeze however again it ran for contractual reasons more than anything else.

We used to have a station called NYNEX Comminity TV, then the Local Channel, which was for the Manchester area, it ran into NTL's digital days too.

Worth mentioning the proposals which came after the collapse of ITV Digital which along with the BBC bid that became Freeview was a joint ITV/C4 bid which retained a pay-TV element on one of the three muxes, and two further bids which did not state their content proposals but were based around free to air content.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2044824.stm
http://www.c21media.net/four-uk-dtt-licence-bidders-emerge/

I was trying to find the original bids on the OFCOM website but having no luck - doesn't help that ITV & C4 coined the Freeview term for their bid. One of the things I remember as being interesting though was ITV's proposal for the ITV News Channel to have regional content, which I think was a peak-time regional bulletin. It would have been interesting to see how that played out in the long term - suspect it might have made it's closure even more inevitable if anything. We know though it would be most useful now for the BBC if for at least two weeks of the year they could throw the regional news on to the BBC News Channel - and indeed I suspect if they put a regional bulletin out at say 8.30pm it would probably be one of the most popular digital shows of the day.

Got them all somewhere in the depths of an old hard drive backup, including the really vague one which was only a page or so long and contained no specifics! Personally, I didn't see a problem with a small pay TV element, and I did subscribe to the original Top Up TV, at the time it was a welcome addition when you consider how spartan Freeview's lineup actually was at the time and I considered it good value. It even brought channels to DTT which had never been on it before or since.


On other companies coining brand names first - let's not forget that Sky had been offering a non subscription service branded 'Freesat from Sky' for several years before the eventual BBC/ITV collaboration came along. It was certainly not an isolated case.

We had something like that too, only launched in the latter part of 2000 though, after the old "Cable 7" had shut down- which was mainly full-screen adverts, with the occasional cheaply made, played from VHS "community" programmes thrown in.

Here you are:
http://www2.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/uploads/Crown_Castle.pdf
http://www2.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/uploads/Digital_Terrestrial_Alliance_Mux_B.pdf
http://www2.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/uploads/Digital_Terrestrial_Alliance_Mux_C.pdf
http://www2.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/uploads/Digital_Television_Broadcasting_Ltd.pdf
http://www2.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/uploads/Freeview_Plus.pdf
http://www2.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/uploads/SDN.pdf
http://www2.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/uploads/Free_To_View_Ltd.pdf

DTA consisted of ITV and Channel 4 who had linked their bid to "Freeview Plus" which was set up by David Chance and Ian West (who would later create Top Up TV).