ITV channels fall off Sky

Don't forget there was ITV Digital at the time which they'd put their eggs in that particular basket so to speak and it was primarily a half-arsed attempt to try and promote it by not having ITV on Sky, though how successful this was on its own is anybody's guess. The ITV Digital monkey was popular though (the BBC even offered him his own show - see here ).

Of course we all know how the ITV Digital story ended, and how Monkey was ultimately more successful than the product he was made to advertise.

Of course it was an era where having terrestrial channels available on Sky at all was a new thing, anyone who’s had analogue Sky were used to it only being extra channels, not the main five,

I remember when C5 became available on analogue satellite. I thought, that's bloody useful, no chance of the other four ever doing the same

In fairness to Channel 5 they primarily did it to boost their reach, their UHF Channel 37 reach was IIRC only about 50% when it launched and didn't improve dramatically for many years afterwards.

Didn't C5 fall off air early in its life due to rain affecting the uplink for the satellite feed that was used by the transmitters? ISTR Croydon gained a line feed shortly after but the rest of the country were not so lucky.

Croydon became the second uplink site, so it had to be line fed (as well as the serendipity of being the C5's most important Tx site !)

Yes, Channel 5 originally was distributed totally via satellite - 4 regions spread across 2 satellites (Orion?) with any transmitter being able to switch to any of the 4* It was a much cheaper solution than doing it traditionally, NTL as it was then got a complete contract to build and operate their network


Then a few weeks in a thunderstorm in South London took them off air one evening and they had a fibre link installed to Croydon to use instead




*in theory that meant that if they so wished they could have broadcast something different to just one just transmitter. Not sure they ever did though

I'm pretty sure that ITV arrived in Sky long before it was rebranded ITV Digital. At that time it was onDigital

Regional ads, presumably?

That's what the 4 regions were used for yes, but if they wanted they could switch, say, Sheffield transmitter to region 1 and everywhere else to regions 2, 3 or 4 and broadcast something different to Sheffield.

In theory at least, why they'd want to I don't know.

I don't think that was the case - I'm pretty certain both happened in 2001. I can't remember which came first, though - the ITV channels appearing on Sky Digital or OnDigital rebranding to ITV Digital. It was pretty close, though, as I recall.

Didn’t the rebrand to ITV Digital happen around the time they got the Football League contract and launched the ITV Sport Channel, which would be August 2001.


I’m pretty sure the ITV channels (ITV and ITV2, not the Sport channel) appeared on Sky around March / April 2002, I remember watching the tests.