ITV Digital

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

~ the eulogy ~

In 1998 i was in Turkey on a 33.6k modem, working out what an evening online was going to add to the phone bill. ITV Digital was a set-top box you rented from a British broadcaster in order to watch British football, and no version of it was ever going to arrive here. i am writing this one entirely from the record.

It launched on 15 November 1998 under the name ONdigital, with fireworks around the Crystal Palace transmitting station and Ulrika Jonsson on the stage. The pitch was digital terrestrial television: thirty-odd pay channels coming in through the same rooftop aerial that already gave you four, with no dish bolted to the wall. Carlton Communications and Granada plc owned it between them. BSkyB had been in the original consortium and was pushed out on competition grounds, which is the detail that decides everything after it.

The subscriber numbers were real but slow. There were 110,000 by April 1999 and 673,000 by the following March, which is growth without ever being enough. It passed a million around January 2001, at a point when Sky Digital had 5.7 million and years of installed dishes behind it. In July 2001 Carlton and Granada renamed the whole platform ITV Digital, to borrow the one broadcast brand every British household already trusted.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

Two engineering decisions did most of the damage. The platform broadcast in 64QAM, and the transmission power it actually got was far weaker than the plan had assumed. A service sold on the promise that your existing aerial would do the job turned out to need a better aerial across large parts of the country. People signed up and then cancelled because the picture would not hold.

The other one was the card. ITV Digital used SECA MediaGuard, and it was cracked thoroughly enough that by 2002 something like a hundred thousand cloned subscription cards were in circulation. That is roughly a tenth of the paying base watching without paying, on a platform that was already short of paying customers.

~ the day it died ~

On 17 June 2000 ONdigital signed a three-year deal with the Football League worth £315 million, covering 88 live Nationwide League and Worthington Cup matches a season from 2001-02. The reasoning was that exclusive football had built Sky, so exclusive football would build this. What nobody checked was whether the number of people who wanted second-tier English football badly enough to rent a box existed at the scale the contract required.

It did not. ITV Digital tried to renegotiate in early 2002 and the League refused. The platform went into administration on 27 March and pay-TV transmission stopped on 1 May. Liquidation came on 18 October 2002 with £1.25 billion of debt, of which around £178 million was money owed to Football League clubs, putting a reported thirty of the seventy-two at risk of folding. Sky picked up the same rights afterward for £95 million.

~ the long tail ~

The advertising is the part that survived. Mother built a campaign around a knitted monkey voiced by Ben Miller, put him next to Johnny Vegas as Al, and it worked far better than the product it was selling. The actual toy could only be had by subscribing, so once the company folded the monkeys turned collectable and were fetching several hundred pounds on eBay. PG Tips took Monkey and Al on in 2007 and ran them for years, which means the mascot has had a longer career than the broadcaster who commissioned him.

The spectrum went to a consortium of the BBC and Crown Castle, later joined by BSkyB, awarded the license on 4 July 2002. They launched Freeview on 30 October with thirty television channels and twenty radio stations, all of it free to air. Identical hardware pitch and the opposite business model, and it worked immediately. ITV Digital was not wrong about digital terrestrial television. It was wrong about charging for it.

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