SMRT-TV: London Calling

March 13, 2006

Bonafide British Person C.J. Quinn covers the strange intersections between British television and American television in...

London Calling
Digital Cable Comes to Britain!
The Queen Flees in Terror!
by C.J. Quinn

Having grown up in the backwoods of Maine without cable, he had only ever known the joys of four TV channels.
In retrospect, that relationship was never going to last.

My ex-boyfriend was the only American my age I have ever met who didn't watch TV. He owned a TV for DVD-watching purposes, but it didn't get cable and, being positioned up a mountainous valley, could only receive a couple of channels filtered through so much white noise and interference as to be utterly unwatchable. Having grown up in the backwoods of Maine without cable, he had only ever known the joys of four TV channels.

In retrospect, that relationship was never going to last.

He was also, therefore, the only American my age I've ever met who understood what it was like to be overwhelmed by the prospect of a hundred channels-worth of nothing to watch. When I went to university, my parents' TV still only received five channels. I'd grown up with the Big Four (BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV and Channel 4), and I remember the excitement of Five being launched in the late '90s — an excitement tempered when we realised all it really showed was the cheesetastic soap opera Sunset Beach, and made-for-TV 'erotic thriller' films that were virtually softcore porn.

This somewhat prehistoric state of affairs wasn't wholly necessary — my parents were far too thrifty to pay for Sky's satellite service, which for most of my youth was the only multi-channel option available to most Brits. Sky involved having a whacking great satellite dish screwed onto the side of your house and paying Rupert Murdoch a whacking great sum of money per month. Cable services began mushrooming in the late '90s, but these all seemed to involve letting a company like Telewest dig a whacking great trench up your front drive to plug you in. As a teenager, I used to sleep over at friend' houses and act like an overexcited kid on an exchange trip from Belarus, hunched in front of the TV late into the night, bathed in the glare of the cathode ray tube, watching appallingly cut-rate music channels like The Box.

Then, on October 30th 2002, God created... Freeview, a free-to-air nationwide digital TV service.

Although many televisions now come with built-in ability to receive Freeview channels via digital receivers, initially you had to buy a set-top box (looking confusingly identical to your VCR) which would let you receive a whole extra 30 or so channels for free. While you still have to pay for satellite or cable if you want to watch 'Alias' re-runs on Sky One or all-new episodes of 'Cribs' on MTV, with a Freeview box (about £30, or $50), you can now receive a bewildering number of variants on the established Big Four. BBC 3, BBC 4, ITVs 3, 4 and 5, More4, E4 and so on... it's a bit like those perfume counters that present you with the choice between CKone, CKBe, CKone Scene and a load of other things that all smell the same when you open the bottle. Add in the host of craptacular shopping channels (Price-Drop TV, QVC et al) and niche interest channels (Men and Motors, Teacher's TV), and you can receive up to 106 channels, plus 25-odd digital radio stations

As of last year, OfCom, the communications industry regulatory body, estimated that 7 million homes in the UK had a Freeview receiver, and this year the number of Freeview-only homes is expected to exceed the number of Sky-only homes for the first time. The steady increase in Freeview homes is just as well, because the Great Switch-Off date grows ever closer. Beginning in 2008, various UK regions will lose the analogue TV signal, and by 2012, the government intends to have switched off the analogue signal completely. From then on, all terrestrial TV in the UK will be digital (or so the theory goes — quite who will sort out all the people too poor to afford new TVs or set-top boxes, and all the elderly people like my granny who think this means they need a computer to watch the telly through, doesn't seem to have been ironed out yet).

The challenge now for the original Big Four is how to diversify their services to give each of their new channels a distinct identity, without losing their core brands in a mess of 'BBCKids, 'BBCGardening' 'BBC Gay Interior Designer' and so on.

The challenge now for the original Big Four is how to diversify their services to give each of their new channels a distinct identity, without losing their core brands in a mess of 'BBCKids, 'BBCGardening' 'BBC Gay Interior Designer' and so on. Recently I heard Channel 4's head of marketing speak on this topic: so far Channel 4 have used digital to offer channels aimed at the younger, edgier section of their audience (E4, apparently referred to in-house as 'Channel 4 without the boring bits'); the more intellectual, arty end of the audience (More4, or 'Channel 4 without the crap bits'), and FilmFour, a subscription movie channel which, from July 2006, will go free-to-air. The success of E4 (More4 is yet to become established) apparently has Channel 4 bigwigs in paroxysm of anxiety about whether they should drop the 'Channel' from the brand name altogether, to tie E4, More4, FilmFour and their future sibling channels back in more firmly to the mothership.

Brand naming stress aside, the question of what defines the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 brands seems set to be a crucial one over the next few years as the Freeview channels compete with each another, and also with the cable services and SkyPlus, the next evolutionary stage of the pay-for-view Murdoch service. How far can the old channels diversify their services to compete for viewers without diluting their brands beyond the point of recognition? I was amazed to learn that QuizCall, an awfully budget Freeview channel dedicated to ridiculously easy phone-in quizzes (60p a go, mind) is actually owned by Channel 4 — it's a huge money-spinner for the channel, but so hideously cheap and cheesy that Channel 4 didn't want the '4' brand anywhere near it. This kind of sneaky brand value protection may take the big channels some of the way, but will surely lead us down the garden path from the current situation of 100 channels with nothing on, until we attain the awesome US TV nirvana of 600+ channels with absolutely sod-all on. The Big Four are all racing to turn channels into networks, but as they keep splitting and subdividing their output, like amoeba frantically reproducing, will they actually turn out a single thing worth watching?

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