HomeChoice

» see homechoice.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

HomeChoice never reached Turkey, and in fairness it barely reached outside north London. In 2000 my connection at home was a 56k modem and TTNet broadband did not arrive for me until around 2006, so the idea of a service that pushed television down a phone line on demand was not something with a plausible local version. There was nothing to be jealous of at the time because there was nothing to compare it to.

Video Networks Limited launched it in 2000 out of Shepherd's Bush, and the claim it carries is that it was the first video on demand service in Britain. The technology was ADSL, which at that point most of the country did not have, and the coverage was an area of north London, which is most of what you need to know about how early it was. You got a set-top box and a catalogue, and you picked something and it started, with no schedule and no tape.

The proposition was correct and the timing was wrong by roughly eight years. By 2003 the service had three thousand subscribers, which is a rounding error against what Sky was doing with a dish over the same period, and the company came close enough to running out of money that the whole thing nearly ended there.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually did ~

The 2004 relaunch is the part worth crediting. VNL got a content deal with BSkyB that put Sky Sports and Sky Movies onto the platform, which is the moment HomeChoice stopped being a technology demonstration and started being a television service people would pay for. It also built out its own unbundled exchange network rather than renting, which was expensive and slow and is why the coverage map stayed so small for so long.

What it was selling by then was ordinary now and strange then. Live channels and a catalogue of programs and films you could start whenever you wanted, all arriving down the same copper pair as the phone, with no dish on the wall and no cable in the street. Every UK on-demand product that came after it does a version of this. HomeChoice did it while the rest of the country was still deciding whether broadband was worth the money.

~ what it became ~

Tiscali bought Video Networks in August 2006, and by then the subscriber count was forty thousand across London and Stevenage. The rebrand landed in February 2007 and the service relaunched publicly as Tiscali TV on 1 March with more than seventy channels, so the HomeChoice name lasted about six months past the acquisition. It kept growing under the new badge, reaching central and northern England by that September and 680 enabled exchanges by 2011.

The name changed once more in January 2010, to TalkTalk TV, after Carphone Warehouse completed its purchase of Tiscali UK. The timing on the original death is the detail i keep coming back to. Netflix turned on streaming in January 2007, the same month HomeChoice's name was being retired in London. One of those two things is remembered as the start of something. The other had been shipping the same idea to real paying households for seven years and got renamed twice by companies that treated it as an acquired asset rather than a first.

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