Quiero TV

» see quierotv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Spain spent the year 2000 trying to sell subscription television down the same aerial that had been on the roof since analog. Turkey in those same years went the other direction and put dishes on balconies. Neither the product nor the argument for it ever crossed to where I was, so what I have here is a Spanish story about a decoder that thought it was also a computer.

The license was granted in 1999 and the service went on air as Onda Digital on 15 november of that year, renaming itself Quiero TV on 5 may 2000. Retevisión held 49 percent of it. Grupo Planeta and Mediapark took 15 each, with Britain's Carlton Communications on 7.5. The lineup ran to fourteen channels at a moment when Spanish terrestrial viewers had two public ones and not much else.

What made it strange was the box. The Quiero decoder came with a conventional telephone modem and a wireless keyboard, and the company marketed it as television with internet. In 2000 that was not a small claim in a country where home connections were dial-up and a family computer was not universal. The television was the thing everyone already owned, so the plan was to put the web inside it and skip the computer entirely.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

It passed 200,000 subscribers by christmas 2000 and that was as good as it got. The problem was what those subscribers were watching. Digital terrestrial has a fixed amount of spectrum and Quiero was trying to fit fourteen channels into it, so most of them were not really channels. AXN or Cartoon Network would occupy a slot for part of the day and hand it to something else, which meant a customer paying for a brand got a broadcast window instead.

Across the same market, Canal Satélite Digital and Vía Digital were selling those same brands as full time feeds with a dish that also gave you more of them. Once a household compared the two offers directly, the terrestrial one had no answer except being cheaper to install, and cheap installation is not a reason to keep paying every month.

~ the day it died ~

By april 2002 the subscriber count was down around 100,000, the shareholders had put in roughly 900 million euros, and the accumulated losses were near 400 million. That month the company opened talks with the Spanish government about handing back the license. There was no buyer and there was no plan.

Transmissions ended at midnight on 30 june 2002, with contracts canceled and billing stopped. Fifteen days of silence was enough for the license to be forfeited, and the Council of Ministers formalized the company's extinction on 4 may 2003, almost a year after the picture went.

~ what got buried with it ~

The frequencies went back out to public tender and were taken by free channels. When digital terrestrial returned to Spain properly in 2005 it came as free television, and the pay version of the idea has never been attempted there again. Quiero did the expensive part of the transition, proving that Spanish households would install the aerial and use a decoder, then handed the finished road to broadcasters who charged nobody.

quierotv.com answers today with a parking page saying the domain may be for sale, on a service that has no idea what used to be there.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »