Why wasn't ITV on Sky Digital in the early days?

I've noticed some channel surfing videos from Sky Digital in the early days, and I noticed that instead of the programmes on ITV, it said "press TV then 3 for ITV". Why was this, and did it apply to STV and UTV too?

It's complicated, but basically it boiled down to ITV (i.e. Carlton/Granada et al) running the "rival" On Digital digital terrestrial service at the time. They obviously wanted as many subscribers to buy their service as opposed to Sky's so thought that withholding ITV would do the trick. Trouble was analogue TV was still around so people could still get ITV that way, hence the Sky prompt for people to tune into analogue. It all ended in 2001.

There are some articles online you can read. They're easy to find if you just type "ITV Sky Digital" into Google:

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/media-forum-itvs-decision-air-sky-digital-right-one-sky-itv-finally-kissed-made-up-just-important-advertisers-itvs-debut-sky-digital-alasdair-reid/49583

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/jan/28/bskyb.itv

http://625.uk.com/digital/index.htm#national

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/1770590/why-wasnt-itv-on-sky

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2742380/ITV-in-digital-deal-with-Sky.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/1219958.stm

It did apply to UTV, STV, Grampian, Channel, Border, HTV, Meridian and Anglia which weren't owned by Carlton/Granada in 1998 either. C&G had to give their approval for any ITV region to appear on Sky.

Shouldn't this be in TV Forum rather than requests?

Not really threadworthy - question was asked, it was answered, let it die in obscurity over here.

This topic has been moved from Requests .

For what purpose? The question has been answered, it should have a big green tick next to it and be left to fade away.

Calm down, it might trigger an interesting discussion. If not, nothing lost.

To be fair some of our younger members may well be too young to remember Sky before ITV arrived.

What a dull forum it’d be if every thread like this ended after one reply.

There was a time when the thought of relying on one provider i.e. Sky, if you had Pay TV was unusual. It was expected that viewers, remember we were in the pre analogue - digital switchover days, would continue to access BBC ONE. BBC TWO, Channel 3, Channel 4 and Channel 5 via their TV tuners. The trigger to address this behaviour pattern and point to a single domestic feed was OnDigital, Viewers on that platform having access to the previous analogue services in addition to the new services. This triggered the heated debates over platform carriage, which continue to this day, and Sky viewers pressing them to provide the standard services too.

I dare say at the other end of the scale other members remember only having up to four channels as opposed to 600. Some members are probably younger than Freeview which in October this year will be 16.