Over in Broadcast (no link, sorry), Guardian Unlimited’s Emily Bell writes that she thinks Sky has no intention of really launching a new DTT box and removing channels like Sky News and Sky Sports News from the Freeview platform. She believes that it’s a move to muddy the waters around the time that Setanta are attempting to gain momentum with their deal to use Top Up TV to run subscriptions to their service.
Indeed she believes that Sky’s proposals will be found ultra vires (yes, I had to look it up, even though I had a good idea what it’d mean).
I’m not so sure. Ofcom changed the rules last year to allow content to be scrambled on Sky’s multiplex. However, Sky wants to change to a different broadcasting format, and that does require Ofcom approval. Here’s what Ofcom says it’s going to assess:

• The potential benefit of a rapid migration from the current compression standard MPEG2, to MPEG4 which will ultimately increase the number of channels available on digital terrestrial television;
  
• The potential detriment associated with a reduction in the number of channels received by existing set-top boxes or digital televisions;
  
• The risk that existing set-top boxes or digital televisions might be incompatible with multiplexes broadcast using a combination of MPEG2 and MPEG4 coding;
  
• The overall effect on consumer confidence in the digital switchover process.
  

I think the third of those is pretty important. But Sky has yet to actually table its proposals with Ofcom – that’s why the suspicion that it’s a spoiler remains there.
But we’re back into the same chicken and egg scenario that DAB finds itself, as an intrinsically old codec is replaced by a newer smarter more efficient one.
Meanwhile Virgin Media and Sky are getting into a right old fight over Sky’s basic tier channels – Sky One, Two and Three, Sky News and Sky Sports News. As things stand, it appears that these will come out of the homes of 3.3m Virgin Media customers at the end of this month. In five days’ time in other words. Would Sky really risk that? They’ve already run those quite nasty ads warning Virgin Media customers that Virgin Media doesn’t appreciate their programming.
But now the game’s getting really dirty and nasty. There are likely to be a lot of disgruntled 24 and Lost fans after this weekend’s episodes.
This is probably the highest profile dispute since Nickelodean pulled off Telewest for a short while a couple of years ago.
In the long term, I suspect that it’ll actually hurt Sky more than Virgin Media. Perhaps a few subscribers will switch, but many will just get annoyed, perhaps download the missing episodes of those programmes meaning nobody gets any money for them or perhaps hand the money straight to the studios in the form of buying DVDs (a win-win in the case of Murdoch and 24).
Even if I was a Virgin Media subscriber who dashed out tomorrow and ordered Sky, it’d undoubtedly be weeks before they could come and set me up. That’s quite a few missed episodes in the meantime. And quite a lot of missing advertising revenue for Sky.
And with Sky News potentially disappearing from Freeview in a few months, does the channel really want to come off Virgin Media too? There was talk in last week’s Mediaguardian podcast that the current Sky regime doesn’t care as much about the loss-leader that Sky News is, compared to previous ones. If that’s the case, then the forthcoming rebrand of little watched Artsworld into Sky Arts will mean in the longer term. The channel doesn’t even carry ads currently!
I suspect at this juncture that the dispute will be resolved, but both sides are playing some serious hardball at the moment, so assume nothing.