What could have made On/ITV Digital a success?

That was an interesting read, thanks for uploading. I doubt Freeview Plus would have lasted. Although it's interesting to see Boomerang and TCM, listed in both Freeview and Freeview Plus.

I still believe having Sky on board would have helped On Digital, end of the day, they have always had the top content. None of Sky's services were listed in the Freeview Plus section. Although when you're charging the same, if not more than Sky for an inferior service, I doubt that was ever going to work. I think if Sky had been part of OD I'd have thought the prices offered would have been more favourable.

I think the On Digital pricing was meant to be more on par with analogue cable & sky. Which didn't really work when up against Sky with many, many more channels for a similar price.

Didn't someone say that the original ONdigital was priced and planned to compete with Sky's analogue service? Which was one of their main mistakes when going up against Sky Digital

Oh yes, can anyone rememeber during the period after ITV Digital went bust when they were trying to get people to send their boxes back, and they had one of the administators on, I think, Radio 5 pathetically sobbing "I want my boxes back".

Edit- there's an audio link on this BBC article, if you can still play back Real Audio files (Seems he was talking to Victoria Derbyshire!):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2561331.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/audio/38574000/rm/_38574039_itv07_shearson.ram

Ooh yes I forgot about that, Carlton and Granada 'generously' bought them. I'd love to know how they thought it was achievable to recall the best part of 1 million STB's.

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.

The brand still exists - £25 for a FTV viewing card, or £175 for a (non-plus) Sky box, dish and installation: http://www.sky.com/shop/freesat/home/

I wonder if anyone actually did return their box or send them £39.99.

NTL/Virgin Media never collected a box from me when I left their service as I moved to a non-cabled street (well it was cabled but there was a fault that involved digging the street up to connect us which would have taken months). The box sat in the attic and when I moved again a year later I left it there.

Must have done, not that it really mattered in the end:

Old VM boxes (usually the old Scientific Atlanta ones that take aeons to boot up) seem to crop up commonly at car boot sales (although without a viewing card they will only receive the 5 basic channels + BBC digital channels, not even the Freeview lineup) so I would guess they don't care too much about recovering them. I imagine they are basically written off once the contractual period has expired.


Going off on a tangent - does anyone remember how until relatively recently (well, 10 years ago!) if you had a TV with a VHF tuner (most Philips sets had one) you could connect the cable TV cable directly to the TV and tune in subscription channels for free? In Plymouth you could get Sky 1 and Sky Sports 2 IIRC. Don't know quite how long that lasted but it worked in 2006 but was gone by 2008.

Old cable receivers still pop up on eBay. I bought one of the old Scientific Atlanta boxes a while back to see if I could do anything with it. Never even switched it on to be honest, and the output is coaxial as opposed to RF or Scart, so I'm not even sure how I'd hook it up. I'd like to find out what would show up if I did though. I'm assuming everything that was on screen was fed from the cable feed so probably very little.

Discussed this in the analogue cable thread that's running at the moment (although "free" Sky Sports sounds unlikely, could have been a temporary promotional thing)