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interactive
something for nothing
Is there life for digital TV after ITV Digital? The success of Freeview seems to argue that there is. Ceri Thomas offers a half-term report on the free digital service
This time last year, Digital TV was in trouble,” said Andy Duncan, BBC Director of Marketing & Communications, recently. “Digital penetration was stalling, and mil- lions of consumers were either confused or quite clear that digital was not for them.”
Speaking to the FT New Media Broadcasting Conference, he
said “To make matters worse, in March 2002, we had the collapse of ITV digital. Its eventual demise, after a long and painful death, could have destroyed consumer confidence for good.
“The problems caused by this, including widespread consumer confusion and apathy, made the prospects for digital development
look worse than ever. There was a real chance that DTT would not survive in this country.”
Which is why the BBC stepped in. Already the
holder of one DTT license (referred to as a multi-
plex), the BBC joined
forces with broadcast technology specialists
Crown Castle to bid for
the three DTT licenses that
ITV Digital had handed back to the Independent Television Commission upon its collapse.
After successfully winning their bids in July, the BBC and Crown Castle then joined forces with BSkyB to set up Freeview.
Starting operation on October 30 2002, Freeview offered British viewers the chance to receive up to 30 channels (including all five of the traditional terrestrial ones, ) plus interactive features and digi- tal radio stations.
If you already had an ITV Digital set-top box or an inte- grated digital TV, then you were ready to watch it (barring per- haps a little retuning to make sure you received all of the new channels). If you had neither of these, it was going to cost you no more than around £99 to get an adaptor. After that though, everything you received was free. No subscription charge, no pay-to-view, no additional charges whatsoever, in fact.
That was six months ago. But exactly how well has Freeview performed in its first half year? The answer is surprisingly well.
Matthew Seaman is general manager for DTV Services, the operating company set up by the BBC-BSkyB-Crown Castle con- sortium to run Freeview. It’s his job to maintain relationships with retailers and manufacturers of digital terrestrial adapters as well as to oversee the Freeview cus- tomer information line.
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“The role of DTV services is to promote the digital terrestrial platform,” Seaman explains. “It’s a marketing-led company with the main focus being on getting information to customers, infor- mation to retailers and informa- tion to manufacturers.”
In its first four months of opera- tion, DTV Services received over two million inquiries to its website and call centre about Freeview. And new adaptors have been flying out of the shops.
“The estimate is that half a mil- lion customers have bought Freeview adaptors since the 30 October,” says Seaman. “I would say that that is an amazing suc- cess for a new product.”
The figure of 500,000 is in fact a fairly conservative one if you’re looking to find out just how many people are watching Freeview.
According to BARB, when you also factor in former ITV Digital customers who are still viewing digital services – albeit now for free – on boxes which they now own and people who already owned integrated digital televi- sions, the figure for the number of households now viewing Freeview edges closer to 1.4 million.
When Freeview launched, two new television channels (Emap Performance’s The Hits and MTV’s The Music Factory) were created especially for it.
Two more new channels (Flextech’s FTN and UK TV’s Bright Ideas) came on line in January 2003. Publicity pushes for those,
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