DTT: Freeview and Top Up TV

I have an old ITV Digital box but won’t be going for this top up TV. For a start, When ITV Digital shut down, I lost £60 because I has a pre-pay subscription but only had it for 6 months before the big shut down, so If I lost £60 in the last DTT pay service, why should I trust this one??? Also my ITV Digital Box is on its last legs. A few days after ITV Digital shut down, the on button on the box got stuck so to turn the power on and off I have to pull the plug instead of just pushing the button. This box is on the second TV in the bedroom so I don’t want Pay TV upstairs when downstairs I have a far superior quality Pay service known as Sky Digital.

In my case I’m not wasting my money on getting channels on DTT which I can already get on Sky.

Also, if they are using the space that TV Travel Shop was on, well on DTT TV travel shop always had loads of picture break up. I’m not paying money for a pay channel which will be unwatchable because of the picture breaking up every 5 minutes!

I don’t think this service will succeed. The future of DTT is Free TV.

The DTG Website has a list of channels to appear on Top Up TV:

Sky One
E4
UK Gold
TCM
Cartoon Network
Discovery
Bloomberg

These will be spread out over 4 24 Hour slots on Mux A and 2.

(Not sure why they put UK Gold twice on the DTG website)

digiperson

I'm am an avid fan of Freeview and do enjoy the chance to watch something extra to the normal five channels. My one moan is that it lacks decent entertainment channels such as UK Gold, now I have an option to get these for a small price and am quite happy to pay for them.

I do believe this kind of service is just right for those, like myself, who don't want to fork out loads of money for hundreds of channel I don't really want.

I expect this platform will accomodate ITV 3?

The website you quote certainly doesn't say what you've said!

It says...

How can you possibly read 'carry elements from' to mean that this is a list of channels to appear on Top Up TV!!!?

Well, it's either that, or a mixture of programmes from the channels, over 4 24 hour slots which I doubt very much.

What do you think it will be then?!

EDIT: To back this up, the Top Up TV website has this page which mentions that CHANNELS such as UK Gold, Discovery and Cartoon Network will be available.

May I ask, are you for or against Top Up TV?

digiperson

The new thread title is hardly any better than the old one.

I'm still not sure I approve of this. Assuming this is a success... we have the free space filled with pay channels I won't receive. Less people will get Freeview if they think they have to subscribe. Some services, like shopping channels, will be removed to accomodate pay services. I'd rather have the shopping - at least it's free. It's an alternative from Sky and Cable.

So the service will carry four channels - one on the Channel 4 free space and 3 on the SDN space. More4 will still be launching.

4 channels timesharing for £10 a month? Not for me. Although I will probably get a fake card for a few quid.

I don't think they will reach a target of 300,000 subscribers all that quickly. I think it's more of a plan to stop free digital TV succeeding. Lets hope that should this plan fail, it will NEVER happen again on DTT!

Read my post above.

digiperson

Where did that capture from their website come from? When I go to www.topup.tv now, I get the same holding page that went up a couple of days ago.


Well that is up to you.


Are the 3 question marks supposed to make it a more probing question??? You wouldn't loose £60 - there is no evidence that they are offering a prepay deal, so the most you would loose is a tenner. And whilst no one likes to loose that, if you can't afford to loose that, then how are you managing to afford pay TV?


If the future of DTT is a graveyard collection of news channels, shopping channels, and of course such legendary channels as FTN and UK Bright Ideas, aswell as acting for a barker for pay TV (I can think of 6 channels on there which actively promote pay TV platforms - either directly or indirectly), then I would very much question that. Freeview have had over a year to get their free service up, and there is still no movie channel, no decent general entertainment channel, and no sports channel. A total of 5 channels (6 if 'Daytime' doesn't materialised) in that time have been planned and withdrawn. I would say that it's got as good as it's going to get, and that ain't very good. I really don't know where all these 'strength to strength' and 'getting better all the time' lines I keep hearing about Freeview can be justifiably levelled at them when the only additions it's seen in a year is Price Drop.TV and two more emap radio stations.


I think it's just a way of saying that some channels will be timeshared. They are listing 7 channels, 6 of which are 24 hour channels (and E4 transmits for 24 hours so that on occasion it can run for 24 hours for things like Big Brother live).

I'd rather they weren't bothering with Bloomberg, there are allready too many news channels on DTT as it is (yes I know it's a business news channel but nevertheless), and I will resent paying for it when it's an FTA channel on satellite.

As to what these timeshares might be? Well I think it's fairly certain that E4 will go on D3&4, and C4 will want it to have all 24 hours.

Sky One will probably also get a 24 hour slot.

Cartoon Network and TCM will almost certainly be paired together, with Cartoon Network during the day and TCM in the evening, with another channel overnight, which to hazard a guess I'd say would be Bloomberg (they surely wouldn't relegate Discovery to overnights?).

UK Gold should get a 24 hour slot, but with only one slot left for both them and Discovery, that can't happen. I'd imagine that they'd get 12 hours each, with Discovery running from 6AM-6PM, and UK Gold from 6PM-6AM.

It's not quite the lineup I'd hope for (nor does it have the space), I'd rather C4 didn't put More4 on DTT (or at least allowed a pay channel to transmit there until More4 starts) so that the existing channels had more room to breath, or even more channels could go on, but then since C4 aren't directly in on it, just taking up the opportunity to put E4 back on pay DTT which they've always wanted, I suppose they will be looking after their own interests more than the platform's.

I think Bloomberg is just there to fill the lineup out, but I'd rather they didn't bother with it (and if, as I think is very likely, it only gets carried overnight anyway, it's usefulness is highly questionable - a UK business news channel is hardly going to carry up to the minute information on UK business news at 3 O'Clock in the morning).

It's a bit of climb down to go down to 7 channels when they said 8-10, I'm disappointed they've only got 4 slots when they badly need 5 (the prospect of UK Gold timesharing I don't think is a good thing, but as I said, I'm almost certain that C4 want E4 available for 24 hour transmission, and I can't see Sky One timesharing, so UK Gold will have to), and I am disappointed they haven't got Nickelodeon and Paramount in the lineup (this combo was the most requested throughout On Digital's lifetime) but it's still better than nothing, and I'll still pay for it (although I do think £10 for that is a bit steep, £8 would be better).


I hope so, and there isn't any attempt to repackage these channels under different names. People don't just want the programming (which in the case of UK Gold and Sky One, can actually be pretty awful at times), they want the names, DTT needs killer channels, and these are it.


Who says free digital TV won't succeed? FTA DTT will be the defacto 'normal telly' standard one day. FTA isn't going anywhere. There was FTA DTT when ITV Digital was running. And imo, Freeview has allready shown that it can't deliver what it promised - it's crap.

This isn't some evil plan hatched to launch ITV Digital MKII, this is a couple of businessmen seeing a gap in the market (which DOES exist), and seeking to fill it, by offering a supplementary service of pay channels for people who want to pay for them. Freeview isn't going anywhere, all your usual Freeview favourites like FTN, UK Bright Ideas, and 2 hours of The Community Channel will still be there, but people (like myself) who would rather watch Sky One and UK Gold will now have the opportunity to do so. What's wrong with that?

Saying 'it will NEVER happen' won't stop it. It's happening. It's real, get used to it.

I think how the diferent parties react to Top-UP depends on where they're coming from.

Ofcom/government may allow TopUp TV because it gets encryption enabled hardware into every home. So at some point after digital switchover they could change the BBC into a subscription service. The option is there for them. A vocal minority want rid of the license fee.

The BBC want Freeview, as is, to continue for the same reason. If you fill everyone's homes with DTT boxes that have no encryption ability, then the TV license will have to stay for the foreseeable future. And the BBC get universality and a guaranteed income.

This all sounds like a fantastic idea, but the annoying thing is I STILL won't be able to get it, as freeview dosen't show in my area, and apparently never will because of the Foirmont Point transmitter in Jersey being taken up with a mountain of French crap that we can't get rid of, so the channels needed to get Freeview are not available.

How annoying! I would love to pay that little bit extra for descent channels like Sky One and Uk Gold without ACTUALLY getting sky, grrr!!

Are we going to see a similar problem that ITV had? I mean, once ITV started to get successful (well, you know what I mean) SKY started to charge a fortune for them to carry the SKY channels. It could happen again.