What a profoundly stupid idea this is! That’s probably a little extreme and unfair, but nonetheless, this’ll be dead in the water in no time – of that I’m sure.
The idea is that subsribers can pay 7.99 a month to get a handful of additional channels. The website lists the 10 channels included in the deal, plus the option of subscribing to one of Richard Desmond’s porn channels.
Careful examination of the times the channels are on reveals that at any given time, only five channels are broadcasting, and since they’re using SDN space, that makes sense. Earlier reports didn’t make clear how they were going to squeeze so much in.
But there are some serious issues here.
First: channel choice. UK Gold is important, as is E4, but evidently Sky’s not playing ball, since the really important Sky One is missing. I’d suggest that their “Sky Travel” which has already moved well beyond a travel channel, will effectively become a sub-version of Sky One. Discovery’s good, but there’s no History Channel. Hallmark would have been a good addition, and frankly TCM should be in the clear not a subscription channel.
Second: boxes. To begin with, only those with ex-ITV Digital boxes will be able to receive the service. That is to say – all those who were pissed off when they went bust, and looked for alternatives like satellite or cable. Nearly all the new boxes on sale today have no slot for a card, and very few will have plans to, since word only escaped of this enterprise in the last week or so. I’d be amazed if many manufacturers were rushing to bother. So Top Up TV are going to have to manufacture add-on boxes, using scart leads to connect them up. Now I still have my old Ondigital box – but boy is it slow.
Third: encryption. This is the area I know least about, but they’re going to have to do something significantly better than ITV digital managed if they don’t want their signal hacked to bits. I’d guess that they’ve gone for some of that Israeli technology that Sky use, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Overall, I don’t see this really taking off. It’s going to confuse the market a bit, and they don’t have any sport or premium movies.
Meanwhile, they’ve just about cut-off any further chance of others getting on to the platform. Still, I confidently predict that the space will be available again in a year or so.