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Reach for the sky
The journey towards a fully digital TV service in the UK has, on the whole, been pretty straightforward. There's Sky, Freeview and cable – each offering its own brand of service.
Even the rebirth of NTL:Telewest as Virgin Media hasn’t really changed the landscape, although cable viewers should, theoretically, get a better level of customer service now the firm's in new hands. No, it's Sky's jockeying with its Freeview offering that looks set to tilt the TV world slightly off its axis.
Up until now, a Freeview household had a subscription-free selection of channels that could be augmented by a handful of additional pay content with a TopUp TV card. One box – two levels of service. A simple concept. Sky, however, has decided to remove its existing channels (News, Sports News and Sky Three) from the free Freeview package and replace them with a more attractive bundle of movies and football.
As a proposition this looks to be a far more appealing range of channels than those being broadcast now. But Sky, being Sky, has plumped for a third Freeview option, bypassing the TopUp TV package in favour of its own subscription service. By encoding its new Freeview channels using MPEG4, rather than the current MPEG2 broadcast system, it immediately makes it impossible for any existing terrestrial digital set-top box to receive Sky’s revised channel package. So, to get the new services, viewers will need to replace their boxes with a Sky Freeview box – one capable of decoding both the exiting MPEG2 channels (BBC, ITV, FilmFour, etc) as well as the new MPEG4 content.
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