Go get your monkey cheque book out... (ITV Digital)

Member Name: David Lu

Product:	ITV Digital
Date:	31/03/02 (543 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap?

Disadvantages: Poor value for money, Shoddy interface, Not footie friendly

..because ITV Digital are a lot in trouble. I must admit, ITV Digital has had a rocky ride in my time. At first, I thought it was a complete rip-off of NTL Digital and Sky Digital, offering less channels for a greater premium price. However, I was extremely desperate for digital TV, but encountered some problems with the rival companies. Firstly Sky Digital offered a satellite service, satellites that aren't allowed in my area of 'culture' (I hate Shakespeare!). Secondly, NTL Digital didn't offer the digital service in my area, even though they spent pretty much the whole of the previous year digging up trenches outside my house. After a visit into my local Dixons, my views were changed when I saw a pre-pay package where you pay upfront for a whole year's worth of subscription for 6 'primary channels' which included the likes of E4 and MTV. As we also had a 15% off discount card at Dixons, this worked out to be something like £5 a month for the said channels. For the first few months, everything was OK, reception was pretty good, I had 6 extra primary channels on top of the free-to-view channels. However, the gimmick soon wore off. 6 channels to be fair is not a lot, and a lot of the features on the ITV Digital interface either don't work, or are too slow. The TV-to-TV channel where you can play games against other TV viewers was taken off the air soon after I joined ITV Digital. The interactive TV guide is absolutely shoddy compared to the
Sky and NTL systems (which are uncannily similar to each other). It is slow as well as uninformative (it only shows the current and next program whereas the rivals offer up to 1 week advance of programs). One way round this is to go to the dedicated TV guide channel, which is rediculously slow and works intermitantly. Another niggle is that the reception is becoming poor, with the picture freezing more often that not (without hyperbole, at least twice a day).

The icing
on the cake for my hatred towards ITV Digital is that I'm a keen Reading FC fan, and the retraction of the huge football TV rights has/will severely dent the finances of many football clubs, especially in the lower divisions (although Reading FC won't be in the lower divisions for long!). This was on top of a fixture change that ITV Digital insensitively implemented. The fixture was changed with less than 2 weeks noticed, changed from a Saturday to a Thursday, completely oblivious to people's originally organised plans. The Thursday also happened to be February 14th, so many were faced with the choice of either Reading FC or their loved one (for many those are the same thing!).

Yeah so in conclusion, don't get ITV Digital, NTL and SKY are the way!

Summary: