Quote:
Originally Posted by KenK
ITV1 do not supply to Scotland, stv occupy channel 103. There are frequent variations (I believe mostly to do with stv not being willing to pay ITV's prices). "stv HD" seems a bit unlikely.  |
Well, it all depends really. The most likely outcome is that you'll get ITV HD or nothing at all. Remember S2? Scottish's answer to ITV2? In the end, all it did was syndicate ITV2 with an annoying opaque DOG covering the ITV2 one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by moroboshi
I never understood this 'deal' with freesat. Who is paying for it? Freesat is a free service, it's not supposed to be a commercial affair like Sky/Fox.
And ITV as a public service broadcaster with priviledged access to bandwidth on all platforms should be bound by the same rules as the BBC - they should provide their content to all.
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The BBC's commitment to the public covers everything broadcasting under the BBC banner in this country. This is why they couldn't launch "BBC Style", "BBC Arena" and "BBC Horizons" as they had hoped to in the mid nineties. As a workaround, they sought a commercial partner (Flextech, now VMTV) and formed UKTV - the channels launched otherwise exactly as they would have, complete with BBC 1997 Corporate presentation.
ITV is a different kettle of fish - more or less all their PSB interests are in the main channel. The issue arises with the use of the ITV brand name - which can only be used to describe the franchised ITV of old (in terms of broadcasting at least). This is why GMTV is automatically entitled to the 6 - 9:25 slot on ITV2, ITV3, ITV4 and CITV. On ITV2 and ITV3 GMTV
sell the slot to ITV plc, allowing them to run it as a 24 hour service. Having had their own (unsuccessful) go at multichannel, Scottish and Ulster now also have an arrangement with ITV plc, allowing them to run the digital channels nationally. STV could (in theory) at any time, take ITV2 back and relaunch S2.
However - ITV don't have to make any service available universally other than the one(s) they are franchised to produce. It is usually in their commercial interest to do so, but it is not required. Examples:
- CITV is not available in Wales on Freeview
- For years and years ITV2 (and ITV1 for that) were not available on Sky due to the ITV Digital tension.
- Towards the end of its live the ITV News Channel only broadcasted during the day on Freeview
- ITV4 was not available on Sky at launch (officially)
Recently there was talk over ITV making its services pay only - I'm not sure how they'd do this without rebranding, because as I said the ITV brand is protected. men&motors, an ITV channel, is still a 'pay' channel but is unaffected.
The only thing I can think of that disproves this logic is the shortlived ITV Sport Channel...