4TVInteractive

~ the goodbye ~

The listings arrived in the middle of the night. Between three and four in the morning a data stream went out over the UK's digital terrestrial network, and any receiver built for 4TVInteractive caught it and stored fourteen days of schedules locally. You then browsed those two weeks instantly, because they were sitting in the box rather than being read off the broadcast as you scrolled.

That was a real advantage in 2002. Freeview did not broadcast a full seven-day guide of its own until 2004, so a recorder bought in that window gave you a fortnight of schedules while the platform's own guide gave you what was on now and what was on next. 4TV Limited designed the reference hardware behind several of those recorders, and from November 2006 the service itself was run by Inview Technology.

The local copy had a cost that nobody minded until the end. A box trusting its stored fortnight could not react to a late schedule change, because the listing it believed was the one it had cached at four in the morning. It also meant the box could keep showing a complete and confident guide well after the guide had stopped being true.

In June 2010 Inview stopped sending updates and confirmed it would terminate the service. The reason given was contractual. The arrangement to distribute the data had ended, and the access to broadcast bandwidth ended with it. The companies who had been paying for that distribution were asked to carry on and could not. The final update carried listings as far as 7 July 2010, so the boxes ran out of days on a Wednesday. Channel 300 came off the Freeview guide on 2 August.

~ the chronicle ~

~ ahead of freeview ~

The Digifusion FVRT100 arrived in 2004 with a 40 gigabyte disk and a proprietary guide called Multiguide. It could also record two channels at once, which was rare that year. Its only real rival on that last count was the Thomson DHD-4000, and both boxes were built on the same 4TV reference design, so the competition was thinner than the shelf suggested.

None of these receivers were licensed to carry the Freeview badge. Two of the brands put the industry's Digital Tick on their boxes anyway. The Digital TV Group later said those products had never been entitled to it and had self-declared the badge. The group tightened its licensing afterward so that nobody could self-certify again.

~ the beko footnote ~

Digifusion was a British brand with a Turkish owner. Fusion Digital Technology Limited began trading in 2002, part-owned by Beko, who manufactured everything it sold. In 2005 Beko bought the company outright and took the brand with it. The recorders at the center of this story were therefore built by the firm whose name is on a large share of the white goods in Turkish kitchens.

That does not mean the service reached Turkey. 4TVInteractive was digital terrestrial television in the United Kingdom, on a channel number, riding bandwidth leased inside that one platform. The boxes were exported and the guide was not.

~ the boxes that went blind ~

Ten models lost their guide. The list runs through five Digifusion recorders and one basic Digifusion receiver, two Inverto units, the Thomson DHD4000 and the Sony SVR-S500. No new box using the 4TV data had shipped for four years before the shutdown, so the installed base was aging hardware with no upgrade path and no way to point itself at a different guide.

A petition asking Freeview to help the stranded owners collected over 760 signatures during July 2010 and roughly twice that afterward. Freeview had no obligation here and took no action. Inview went on supplying extended listings to devices built around the Radio Times Extra guide, which was the same company's other product on a contract that still had someone paying for it.

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