BBC to switch off red button text

A friend of mine who moved from London to Llanelli got the Pace DTR-201-F as they were fed up with waiting later to watch English C4 shows on S4C. Channel 4 on DTT only in Wales was a great incentive for take up of Freeview.

Personally, my first box was the OnDigital Nokia Mediamaster, but my first Freeview box was the Goodmans GDB2, which wasn't a great box. I soon upgraded to the GDB3 which was a much better receiver and had regular OTA software updates. By the late noughties I upgraded to Freeview+ with a Vestel Hitachi PVR and then a Tesco Dion one before getting a DVB-T2 tv.

Only then they had to put up with BBC2W and its rescheduling. Which lead to the early DSO sites in Wales having to keep BBC2 on analogue until 2W was scrapped.

I had a mediamaster too, bought cheap after ITV Digitals collapse, still with On Digital logos all over the menu.

ITV Digital customers were given stickers to cover up the old branding on the boxes, I couldn't be bothered!

I didn't realise that. Why would a customer bother to do that? What possible incentive was there for them?

Because Sky had Sky Digital branded satellite receiver boxes?

On Digital was a total failure, so removing all traces and replacing it the ITV Digital brand, at the time was a sensible thing to do.

15+ years on, sending silver foil stickers out to subscribers in the post does seem insane.

I remember reading a news about Samsung selling an 'Evolution Kit', which would implement next-level standards on older sets, to customers.

I think there should be a global standard for such kit, so the customers can update their TVs to the latest standard without having to buy a new set, regardless of manufacturers.

Judging by this PDF upload, which is granted not the best way to judge things, they weren't even that nice looking anyway: https://media.onhistory.co.uk/documents/itv-box-sticker-upgrade.pdf

And of course it's amazing the stickers would let you 'upgrade to the latest technology'!

No that didn't happen, 2W was scrapped a week or so before the first sites in Wales underwent DSO.

You are possibly getting confused with the 2005 Ferryside trial, where the methods proposed for DSO were tested out in the village, by just DSO'ing that single relay station. There BBC 2 analogue was indeed retained because of the 2W issue, but the other three channels (BBC 1, HTV, S4C), were removed from analogue. Because at that time C5 was carried on the SDN mux (which is COM 4 in today's money) Ferryside today remains the only Freeview-Lite relay that carries four muxes rather than just the three PSB muxes

How very W1A of ITV...

Yes - at one point Samsung sold very slim, premium LCD TVs with a single power+video cable from a second box that handled tuning, HDMI switching etc. duties. I think the aim was for that second box to be upgradeable/replaceable whilst you kept the same display on the wall.

However the major developments that have driven replacement TVs have been display rather than source related (Full HD->4K, SDR->HDR etc.) so that concept probably died a death.



I think that the market for that is kind of covered by third party set top boxes like Apple TV 4K, Amazon Fire TV stick, Roku Streaming Stick etc. - you replace those rather than your TV if you want to upgrade your online connectivity ? Or do you mean a way of replacing MHEG5 with HbbTV in the field ? I doubt that kind of thing will happen - as the timescales for those kind of upgrades are once every 10 years or more - which is 'replacement TV' territory.

I assume (or hope) that was some Virgin Trains style humour but it is very cringe!

I seem to remember that people who did put the stickers on their remotes found the logo wore off very quickly.