By Jason Wright (Entertainment Expert)
AS BRITAIN closes in on its much hyped complete switch to digital television; here is a look at the defining moments in multichannel television.
Before it began, choice on TV was of course very limited with only BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4 around. There was cable television around in those days, but it cost an absolute fortune to setup. Then in 1989, all that changed with the launch of the Astra satellite and with it, Sky Television. A selection of five channels; Sky One, Sky News, Sky Movies, Eurosport and MTV plus a wide selection of other specialist channels and European offerings was designed to give the viewer more choice. Sky was synonymous for being the first company to offer free installation, only paying for the subscription to the channels.
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One year later, a rival satellite service was set up, called British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB). Planned to launch before Sky, several fundamental problems put it back and the service was written on the wall from the start. It disappeared at the end of the year, in a merger with Sky to form British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). The company soon went on to end the terrestrial era of league football by earning a contract to air matches for the newly formed English Premier League in 1992. Elsewhere, cable television was still lagging behind, but becoming more affordable with the lower prices being offered by specialist companies like NTL and Cable & Wireless. Though these services had lower quality signals than satellite, their choice was pretty much the same.
In 1997, the then newly-elected Labour government passed a bill to phase out analogue television by the year 2012. To help with this, they set-up a new platform of multichannel television called Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT). A consortium of Sky and the two biggest companies of the ITV network, Carlton and Granada, won the auction to set up a service. However, a competition review forced Sky to drop out and led to Rupert Murdoch launching the first ever digital satellite service Sky Digital the following year. Over 200 channels were now available at the viewer’s fingertips.
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A few months after the launch of Sky Digital, Carlton and Granada unveiled their DTT service, On Digital. Basically a stripped down version of cable, it concentrated in only offering the basic content that viewers would want. This didn’t succeed, mainly due to Sky marketing it in a negative manner. Three years after its launch, the service rebranded to ITV Digital and they wrestled away contract rights to The Football League. A rise in subscribers didn’t come and the service collapsed less than a year later, replaced by the more popular Freeview service, offering channels without the need for subscription.
By this time, cable had also gone digital through both NTL and Telewest’s services. Both companies were taken over in 2007 by Virgin, thus creating Virgin Media. They did no favours by getting into a row with BSkyB over the carriage of its channels, leading them to be removed from the Virgin service for more than 18 months. Meanwhile, in 2006, Sky continued its trend of firsts by being the first company to offer high definition (HD) programming with Sky HD (renamed Sky+ HD two years later). Meanwhile, Freeview had gained a service called TopUpTV that offered additional channels for a subscription cost and Freesat was launched in 2008, being the first satellite service with only free-to-air content.
2008 saw Britain’s long-awaited move in digital only television begin. Over a four year process, analogue will be switched off and replaced with digital signals. It will no doubt increase choice to many people who can’t access digital services at this point in time but the question is, will it succeed? We will have to wait until the whole process is complete.
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