ITV’s HD delusion

So ITV has finally gone HD. Kinda. If you meet ALL OF the following conditions

- You happen to have freesat, one of the many types of multichannel TV in the UK.

- You happen to be watching one of the few times they actually simultcast a show in HD. There aren’t many.

- You happen to have the right postcode. Who ever though the postcode lottery would extend to TV?

- You bother to press the red button.

All in all, bit of a mess. You’d have thought that after the ITV Digital debacle, whereby ITV held back ITV1 from Sky Digital to support Ondigital; its ill-fated digital terrestrial service which suffered from buggy software and a lack of channels, that it might not rush to do the same with ITV HD. But alas, no, they just haven’t learned, and despite Sky HD and Virgin V+ offering hundreds of thousands of HD ready viewers eager to watch new HD channels, they launched it on freesat, beset with……can you guess? Yes, buggy software and a lack of channels. There isn’t even a single Freesat PVR on the market yet and the first one isn’t due until Xmas.

At least with ITV Digital, they owned the system and given the more limited number of channels that the system could carry, knew that ITV would also do disproportionately better if the platform succeeded vs sky or cable (fewer rivals channels equalling less competition equalling higher audience share for the ITV channels). With Freesat, they don’t even have that advantage. Any TV channel wanting to broadcast just has to pay for satellite transponder space (which they probably have since the channels on there generally already exist on Sky and the same feed goes through to Freesat boxes) and an EPG fee to show up on the Freesat system. So if the system takes off like Freeview did, then, unlike Freeview, lots of channels will line up to join and ITV will be in the same boat, a few channels amongst hundreds. Freesat have even stated that they expect to have 200 channels by 2009, and given the number of free to air channels which already exist on Sky, it doesn’t seem like an unrealistic target.

The selection available right now isn’t even that great. Freeview had a side benefit that as the capacity filled up, the costs of carriage soared to the point where only the biggest media players could afford to hold slots, leading them to launch higher quality channels which made the investment worthwhile. Freesat on the other hand doesn’t have a whole variety of channels, notably Channel 5 but also Virgin 1, Five US, Dave and so on. Whilst Freesat’s unique selling point remains a few episodes of Harley Street in HD it’s never going to compete.

~ by dodgyreception on July 19, 2008.