It seems that some on the Freeview forum are furious, that after shelling out for a Freeview HD box, some on their "full time" ITV HD stream is being blocked out due to content rights issues, replaced with a static message card. Apparantly this is particularly affecting movies.

Is this also likely to affect us if/when we get full time ITV HD?

The BBC have also told them very few movies will be shown on BBC HD due to similar issues.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s....php?t=1220415

Presumably they aren't paying for terrestrial broadcast rights? - but why that should matter when they are transmitting FTA via satellite to FAR more Freesat viewers and most of Europe as well.

The BBC have not said they will not be broadcasting movies, they've just said that BBCHD is not a movie channel, which is true. They show the odd one, but most of their content is in house produced. All those natural history programs, sport, like the winter olympics, costume dramas, what's the problem? Like they said, if you want 24/7 movies, get sky. The BBC is required by it's charter to do other things.

ITV don't care. They're also using a DOG that does not comply with the EBU guidelines for DOGs on HD channels and reducing the risk of screen-burn to consumer sets.

The gist of the new EBU guidelines are:

If it is a static image, it should not be on screen for more than 6 hours in every 12 on more than one occasion in 7 days.

Saturated blue or yellow should be avoided.

The luminance of the DOG should be no higher than the average picture level.

Full details here: http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r129.pdf

This is the freeview HD service, which is a 24 hour upscaled version of ITV1 - the guidelines probably don't apply to freesat HD yet, as they broadcast such a limited amount.

You would be lucky if you get 6 hours of ITV HD broadcast per day on FreeSat.

Is this why there are two versions of ITV HD, one for Sky and the other for Freesat?

Wait till it starts next week - until ITV HD launches, who knows?.

Exactly...."SPECULATION is the Mother of INVENTION"

Mikembe

Maybe we should remember that when Five started test broadcasting for FreeSat they did similar, but since the channels official launch day i've never seen that card appear since.
With luck the same will be said of ITV HD once its official launch arrives on April 2nd.

Considering that ITV have actually acknowledged that they didn't have the terrestrial HD broadcast rights, and DID broadcast via satellite (because they had satellite HD rights), it's seems pretty certain that there will be no such problems on Freesat/Sky. I would also fairly confidently expect that the offical launch of ITV HD on 2nd April will coincide with them obtaining such rights.