ITV Christmas Hearts era

Wow, was it as late as 2001? Thought it was earlier than that!

I remember when I got Sky digital and every time you looked on the ECP it say 103 push TV button and push no3.

There was a really fantastic post either here or on DS (I think it was in the Ratings Thread) by Steve Williams in response to another post, about how ITV at the turn of the millenium were under the impression people would watch them regardless of whether it was on Sky Digital or not. But what happened IIRC was loads of people at the time were getting Sky and just watching all the other channels, they weren't loyal to ITV and so not having it on the EPG was just unnecessarily harming them, so this mentality damaged them and had repercussions for years afterward.

(Bear in mind that's a massively truncated version of what the posts were about, taken from my memory)

The search feature on DS is still broken and I can't find it through Google so you'll have to take my word for it, it was a great post.

To be fair, the BBC faced the same cost issue of getting all their English Regions on to DSat, which didn't happen until 28 January 2002, although they did at least broadcast the network version of BBC One.

Only London, South, Midlands, North West and Yorkshire were on Sky from January 2002, after UK Today was axed. It was a further 18 months before all versions of BBC1 went FTA on DSAT.

My bad!

It was indeed May 2003 before all the regions made it to DSat.

I'm sure it was late 2001 that ITV1 and 2 launched on Sky because I joined TVF in September of that year and it was after that.

21 November 2001. Although they'd had a deal with Astra since March, they still had to negotiate with Sky and do the technical stuff.

That takes me back to the early days of TV Forum - wasn't there some testing before that, where all ITV regions had a pattern in the top left-hand corner showing you which region it was?

Just about visible in this small pic from TV Ark:

Yes, I remember those. All part of the test transmissions. Remember all the colour bar signals, with 'William Street' ident ? (The then NTL's switching centre in NW1)

The BBC dropped encryption (NDS/Sky Videoguard) and (allegedly) with the savings were able to rent enough extra transponder space (on the new narrow beam Astra 2D (that ITV were also using)) for most of the BBC 1 regions. They were a little quieter regarding the extra EPG fees to regionalise and postcode map BBC 1 [1] and have all the out of area variants on 9xx. So the net result may well have been the same overall expense, or possibly more (it's never been clear how some rights holders assessed the BBC going unencrypted, and whether extra costs were levied there)

[1] I remember also, initially ITV's regional postcode database was used by Sky (for the BBC), so places such as Oxford ended up with BBC 1 W Midlands on Ch 101. Happy days !

Taking it way off topic but does anyone remember around the same time, someone on here discovered we could tune in a particular frequency on a Sky Digital box which on one occasion contained a live feed from the Richard & Judy set, meaning they could be viewed during the ad break? As I recall they just sat there looking miserable, barely speaking to each other (although the mics were muted for the majority of the time).