bye, bye OnDigital
richardadc
Posts: 1,121 Forum Member
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I am finally getting sky, after all the problems with OnDigital. Maybe one day OnDigital will improve, but at the moment i am not prepered to pay the same ammount as Sky for about 50 less channels.
I may pop in time to time to annoy you poor OnDigital subscribers.
I may pop in time to time to annoy you poor OnDigital subscribers.
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Please though, don't become as annoying as some from the Sky forum; we've got enough petty w***ers from that area as it is!
[This message has been edited by Byron (edited 27 June 2000).]
..we've got enough petty w***ers from that area as it is!
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You've got plenty of your own too!
Noel Hennessy
Do we have to slag each other off? Is it a new condition of signing up for the forum these days?
Noel Hennessy<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Noel I take it you weren't talking to me as my comment was merely a joke and if you did take it seriously then you should have also taken into consideration that Bryon slagged someone off to start with!
As usual a light hearted joke couldn't be taken in the way it was intended; as a joke.
Why don't we just get back to the proper posts?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRtlBudur-8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p12QxWxsNp0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOwekJ1iOJM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bv2hQR10-M
* Reception problems due to under power transmitters
* Less bandwidth than Sky
* Insecure encryption
* Paying a lot of money for 2nd rate football
it kept on working though the years until it ended up not being compatible
http://www.onhistory.co.uk/timeline/ondigital/
its a shame how they messed it up.
And BSkyB launched free stb ..,., a day before onD lunched
I had Sky before I moved to Ondigital(ITV Digital) and I only had Sky before that as the old BSB 5 channel TV service closed and I was moved over to Sky.
Darren
So the box came home and got plugged in. After the extended tuning faff, we found we could reliably receive Channel 5, all to the good, and BBC Knowledge and... nothing else. No MTV, in fact less TV than we were getting in analogue form before we had the box in circuit!
Our indefatigable pater's next step was having a massive new aerial bolted onto the side of the house. Not only did this singularly fail to pull more stations down to our ONdigital setup, it actually put us in danger when the ruddy thing blew down in a storm days after going up.
The upshot was the ON box was bundled away and chucked back at Carlton and Granada with some zeal, and we finally threw our money at Murdoch, using the hole the short-lived aerial's installer had made in the wall to run the dish cable through. Not only did we now have telly, we had real choice, and I spent many happy days of my youth lapping up the output of Trouble, Challenge, UK Play and MTV2, amongst others.
A change of circumstances saw us drop down to the free channels in 2004, but these - bolstered by the likes of BBC Three, Chart Show TV and more recently Food Network - have served us well enough. My biggest gripe, as you'd expect, was the loss of Challenge...
A few years later, and with ONdigital itself now long dead, I was tasked with picking up and setting up Freeview equipment for a relative who'd moved house. For the craic, I decided to whack it into the telly at home to see if DTT was still almost useless to me. Surprisingly, we could now get most of Freeview - except D3&4, which remained beyond our grasp, though as most of the channels on that were FTA down our dish, that didn't bother me much. Shortly after, the launch of Dave - a channel I knew I'd enjoy, and which I'd have to pay for on Sky, saw me permanently augmenting our free-TV setup with a Freeview box, and this best-of-both-worlds combo continues to serve us our daily telly diet.
And just when I'd made peace with the telly gods, guess which channel Sky bought in 2011 and turned free-to-air? I could ramble on, but I'd rather just shut up and happily rewatch the same Crystal Maze, Family Fortunes, Defectors and Catchphrase episodes I last saw a decade ago...
(Hey, if my ONdigital had worked in the first place I wouldn't have had Challenge at all until recently, so let me call this a win, yeah?)
From posts on here at the time I was not the only one, pixillating and freezing picture when a fridge or central heating switched on or a vehicle went by on the road. The Phillips STB was a crock of shite. I actually got a new STB which was replaced by ITV a couple of weeks before it folded, I hardly used it as soon after I returned to subscribing to Sky.
I bought a new TV with built-in Freeview and I could get a perfect reception on it with the same aerial that the ON/ITV Digital STB could not. It was not the system or aerial but that dreadful STB which is still up my loft somewhere an unloved piece of electronic crud that one day I might take it apart as it would never surprise me if it was made up of old cocoa tins, elastic bands and parts of an old toaster or washing machine, such was its uselessness.
as a modulator between a DigiHome box and a small TV without a scart socket that lives in a wardrobe in the bedroom.
Regards
Granada and Carlton sunk £1 billion onto this turkey, effectively bankrupting the two companies, forcing a merger into the corporate behemoth that is ITV Plc. Regional identity was erased, and their satellite channels wiped out. Charles Allen has a LOT to answer for.
Fully secure until Sky TV paid some hackers to crack it and spread it to everyone.
It would have happened anyway.
Regional ITV was sunk the day Granada launched a hostile bid for the Tyne Tees franchise. It was completely unnecessary, ended up taking £24million/year out of regional TV in the North (without that bid, Mersey TV's bid for Granada would never have got off the ground, and both Granada and TTTV would most likely have been unchallenged), and it put in place a chain of events (the asset-stripping of the Tyne Tees franchise by YTV) which showed the way for companies wanting to go back on their agreements.
I know why they did it -- Tyne Tees was a stubborn, old-fashioned company which had stuck to its roots being owned by a small cabal of local companies, and would have been unlikely to have sold out easily, frustrating plans for a single ITV in England.
Chances are, even without that ITV would have gone in much the same way, but it would have been slowed down massively, and OnDigital would probably not have played out the way it did.