ITV Box Office

Plenty of slots available on the Sky EPG to carry ITVBe HD and CITV HD. The Sky+HD and Sky Q boxes have enough memory to store a large number of channels.

ITV at least has this luxury compared to 2004, where hardware constraints on some Sky digiboxes (500 channel limit) caused Sky to temporarily halt channel launches until March 2005. ITV3 was affected by this, up until their 11th hour deal with buying out Sky's share of GSB, which automatically allowed it to gain a valuable EPG slot on LCN 119 (ITV2 given LCN 118, 120 reserved for ITV4 upon its 2005 launch).

ITV4 and CITV also launched later on Sky and cable compared to Freeview. ITV4 itself popped up on the Sky EPG a week after launch, whereas CITV took up to three months after its March 2006 launch to be added on Sky and NTL.

Indeed, I don't think there is any restriction on HD channels joining Sky's EPG for HD or Q STBs.


The bigger question is why you would want to see the drivel on ITVBe in SD, never mind HD.

Where?

The same content on Be had rotted ITV2's core for years before Be launched, then ITV2 began to improve its content, even more so with Family Guy and American Dad coming from BBC Three.

ITVBe is terrible for the most part but not for the target audience it's aiming for. It's also the main reason why ITV2 had largely become more bearable to be fair.
Encore on the other hand has diluted ITV3 to an extent.

I'm sure I read somewhere that the only real limit to the number of channels on Sky is (in theory) 899 + the four digit radio channels, and the amount of satellite capacity available at 28.2° East. The pecking order of the channels of course is subject to the EPG allocation rules and if appropriate the HD swap procedure.

I believe the EPG information for the channels is cached on the internal hard drive so in normal circumstances it's not a "memory" issue as such, though if there is no hard drive or it has packed up the EPG will still work, just slower. Some other stuff wouldn't work either (most obviously the Sky+ functionality).




Yeah but only with regards to its presence on Sky, as Encore is exclusive to Sky, Sky Go and Now TV. ITV3 on the other platforms remains as is. Encore has had new programming, the likes of which will probably eventually find its way to ITV3.

I hope that the CITV HD is going to be on Freeview.

It won't be. None of the others are.

Blame capacity constraints and running costs of HD services. The latter is why many require 'sub club' revenue from Sky and Virgin.

Even with the current set up converted to DVB-T2 I just can't see any of the offshoot ITV/C4/C5 channels arrive on Freeview, the lack of capacity will be more of an issue even if the paywall is lifted on Sky and Virgin. It's the reason why it took longer in the first place to gain HD services on Freeview.

C4 the likeliest of the lot, but there doesn't seem any urgency for HD to become the norm and SD to be phased out for primary channels at least. Indeed arguably Sky are using their position to ensure that doesn't happen by keeping HD as a premium product and keeping the SD channels around, even though the technology they've provided viewers has been HD as standard for some time now.

With sport and movies now available through alternative measures, including their own non-HD NOW TV, they know HD is one of the few things they still have going for it and normalising it would lead to cable and Freeview looking to do the same, so it's just not in their interests.

The BBC Have all their HD channels on Freeview.

I'm still bemused as to why some ITV HD regions aren't on Freeview, and yet are on Sky & Freesat.

Presumably the BBC / Atos / Arqiva (who own the licence for, code and mux and distribute PSB3) costs are more than ITV are prepared to pay for the additional coding and mux and distribution chains.

The way PSB3 HD DVB-T2 works, someone would need to pay for encoders for BBC One HD, BBC Two HD, ITV HD, C4HD, Five HD and Film4+1 SD in every region that carries different content on a regional channel. If ITV are the only broadcaster who wants unique content on a given transmitter - I assume there is a cost to ITV for this? ITV don't just pay for an encoder for their own content - because PSB3 is statmuxed, all channels in the mux need to be uniquely encoded for it to work. For years PSB1 - aka the BBC SD mux - carried BBC One HD at a fixed bitrate to allow BBC regions to opt-out by replacing it with another fixed bitrate service encoded in the regional centre, with only BBC Two, BBC Choice/Three/CBBC and BBC News/BBC News 24 - and at one point I think BBC Four - in a statmux excluding BBC One - but this wasn't as efficient as statmuxing everything - so now the regional feeds are sent to a central coding and mux operation to be encoded in a single stat mux.

(Stat mux = Statistical Multiplexing - where all channels in the statmux pool dynamically share a single pool of bandwith, with bitrate dynamically changed based on the complexity of each channels' content in encoder terms)