ON/ITV Digital Number of Channels

At the moment, on Freeview, 77 channel numbers are taken up by Full/Part time TV channels, radio channels and Text Channels

But During On digital/ITV Digital years........when the service was at its peak...how many channel slots were filed up with TV/Text channels???

The reason why I'm asking is that at the mo, my Phillips On Digital box has 93 channels stored (77 from Freeview, and the rest all old empty channels like TV travelshop, the old ntl text channel, etc etc) and with more tv channels being added all the time, I dont want my box to crash if too many channels are stored on it.

Whats the max my On Digital box can hold?


Thanks x

Go to the Getting Started Menu and select "Store Channels." This will erase all the old OnD and ITVD channels and leave you with your Freeview and TopUp ones.

Basically it can hold 999 channels as it has 999 LCN positions. In the OnD days all multiplexes were 64QAM which meant they carried up to 8 video streams with the remainder left over for radio. BBC Parliament used to be an audio channel back in the day as the BBC only had Mux 1 to play with.

Wouldn't it be 1000 positions? (000-999)?

Anyway, just because the software can handle 3 digit LCN numbers that doesn't necessarily mean that the box could store 1000 channels. It is completely inconceivable that DTT will require so many numbers during the useful life of the receiver (or indeed, ever), and would thus be very wasteful of resources to build in enough memory to support this.

Modern boxes might possibly be able to fill up all 1000 possible combinations, but I doubt very much that the 1998 spec for an On Digital box allows for this.

Hey, you never know. Why do most televisions and remote controls have 1 - 9 channel buttons on the remote controls, and upto somthing like 40 channel spaces on a regular television, when you know that there will be no more analogue channels other than the 5 we have, possible a video recorder, unless you have about 5 on different frequencies.

The Digibox most likely does support a 1000, and was designed to support 1000. But in reality these will never be filled. Just like the regular anologue television

Because almost no TVs are designed solely for the UK market any more; they will all use components designed for a range of markets. In many markets, you'd be able to use those extra channel spaces because you'd pick up cable TV directly with your TV set and without a box (indeed, most analogue TVs sold in the UK today have a tuner which can pick up analogue cable broadcasts too - as anyone whose ever plugged a cable TV cable into a TV's aerial socket and then found out they can tune in Sky Sports 2 will testify too...).

When TVs sold in the UK were generally designed wholy for and with the UK market in mind, it was extremely rare to find a TV with any more than 8-12 channel presets (and I'm not talking about piano-key jobbies from the 70's, I'm talking about going right into the 90's with electronic tuning and remote control too).



40 channels which only have to store a UHF channel number will still only use a tiny amount of memory. 1000 which have to store the UHF channel number of the multiplex, the PIDs of the audio and video streams which make up the channel and allow for a fairly long channel name will use rather a lot more. And you don't engineer in something which is will almost certainly never be used during the service life of the product.

At our High School there was TV that six buttons marked down as BBC1-3 and ITV1-3, obviously before Channel 4 came on air.

FYI both my Panny portable television and my dad's widescreen panasonic have 99 analogue channel positions. One assumes this is for multiple inputs - i.e. say different types of digital box on RF loops, video players / recorders through rf, etc - though tbh 99 does seem like overkill