Top Up TV
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Top Up TV is a pay television service that operates in the UK on the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) platform alongside the Freeview service. It was launched on March 31 2004 by two former BSkyB executives, David Chance and Ian West, the first pay television on the platform since the collapse of ITV Digital in 2002 to be the end of pay television on the platform. Top Up TV is available through new DTT receivers with card slots, integrated digital television sets with a CAM or legacy boxes from ONdigital/ITV Digital.
The service offers a variety of basic pay channels, rather than the premium sports and movie channels that were offered by ITV Digital. Examples of programming include repeats of British television classics such as Only Fools and Horses and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet on UKTV Gold, documentaries from Discovery, cartoons made by Time Warner, and live sport events on British Eurosport. Eleven channels are available on the service but these are timeshared, such that a maximum of five are on air at any given time. Overnight this drops to as few as two channels (from the main package), in order to make space for premium adult entertainment channels.
Pricing
- The "main package" has an initial "connection charge" of £20, together with a monthly subscription charge of £7.99. It is said to be aimed at those unable to have satellite or cable, and those viewers who want more than what Freeview offers but do not wish to pay £10–£40 per month to Sky Digital or cable operators.
- Additionally Top Up TV offers the adult material from Television X for £9.99/month in addition to Top Up TV subscription. Unlike the main package Television X carries a minimum 12 month subscription.
- Red Hot TV provides pay-per-view (PPV) adult material for at £5.99 per night. Red Hot is the only channel that is not credited as being provided by Top Up TV. However, all facilities that allow this channel to broadcast on DTT are provided by Top Up TV.
- PPV Scottish Premier League matches are offered at £8 per match (£10 for Rangers vs. Celtic).
- Up until May 31 2006 when it was discontinued, a prepay service known as Top Up TV Pay As You Go offered viewing for £2 a day. Cards were bought for £24, and viewers called a telephone number to activate that card for the day. Unlike its predecessor Xtraview, Top Up TV Pay as You Go offered full access to all Top Up TV channels.
Controversy
The BBC, a member of the Freeview Consortium, has accused Top Up TV of confusing customers by re-introducing pay-tv to DTT [link]. The Freeview consortium had intended to push DTT as an entirely free-to-air (FTA) option to avoid scaring off those who did not want to pay to watch TV. However, some suspect that the entirely-FTA proposition was a ploy by the BBC to safeguard the TV Licence. Initially, the BBC tried to insist that all of Top Up TV's channels were put at the end of the EPG to avoid confusion. In response to this Top Up TV filed a complaint [link] with Ofcom over the BBC’s apparent refusal to list its new subscription channels on the DTT electronic programme guide. Ofcom spoke to the BBC and the matter was resolved between the parties. [link]The Red Hot channel, which uses Top Up TV's Xtraview system, found itself with threats of legal action for infringing the Freeview trademark when the channel's advertising initially claimed to be on Freeview and used the Freeview logo.
Top Up TV has also found itself on the wrong side of a number of Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and Ofcom adjudications (5 at the last count), which have ruled that Top Up TV's advertising does not make the time-shared nature of the service clear enough. Their advertisements have been criticised in these ruling for appearing to indicate that 11 full channels are on offer when, in fact, the company only has broadcast access to 4.5 channel spaces and none of their channel offerings are broadcast full-time unlike their satellite and cable competitors. The critical adjudications can be viewed directly by going to the Advertising Standards Authority's website [link].
The timesharing system has also lead to criticism as it has cut programmes off before they are finished - especially on British Eurosport, and to a lesser extent on UKTV Gold. To reduce mid-programme cut-off, channel suppliers joining the service had to undertake to align their channel's schedules to fit around Top Up TV's timesharing #redirect .
On May 18, 2006 Top Up TV Ltd, Top Up TV's holding company, changed its name to Minds 1 Limited and entered members voluntary liquidation[link]. According to Top Up TV the move is part of a restructuring programme[link] and will see the company demerged into three separate companies. Three new Top Up TV companies were registered at Companies House. These are Top Up TV 1 Limited[link], Top Up TV 2 Limited[link] on 25 November, 2005 and on 2 December, 2005 Top Up TV 3 Limited[link]. This, combined with the initial heavy £7 million loss, has resulted in increased media speculation regarding the viability and future of Top Up TV.
Subscriber numbers
During the first month on air the service gained around 20,000 subscribers. Various industry speculation in early 2005 put Top Up TV's subscriber numbers at somewhere between 140,000 and 200,000 subscribers. However, there is speculation that these figures may have been hurt by E4 leaving the service in May 2005. In order to break even, Top Up TV originally aimed to obtain 250,000 subscribers by the end of March 2006, which was the second anniversary of its launch. Although, according to an article in the Mail on Sunday[link] in June 2006, Top Up TV have reached their target of 250,000 subscribers, since Top Up TV has not released any official independently audited subscriber or churn figures it is unknown whether this figure is accurate, or whether it was achieved by the original target of March 2006. This lack of offical figures has given rise to much speculation as to how well the company is really doing.Broadcast space
Top Up TV transmits its channels on multiplex A, which was originally owned by SDN, a subsidiary of S4C, NTL, and UBM. On 27 April 2005 SDN was sold to ITV plc, which is reported to have its own plans for the multiplex in 2010. Apart from TCM all of Top Up TV's capacity is rented from Five[link]. This has left Five without the capability of launching it's own multichannels on Freeview, which BBC,ITV and Channel 4 have already done, in order to limit damage to their market position come digital switchover. On 6 July 2006, Five announced two new channels Five Life and Five US, to be broadcast on capacity currently used by Top Up TV's channels [link], under a £20m investment made in Top Up TV after Five five dropped out of bidding for separate Freeview capacity on 18 November 2005. So as to effectively use their remaining space, Top Up TV announced the launch of Top Up TV Anytime, where programmes broadcast overnight will be stored on a new PVR[link], ready to be played back on demand. The new service and Five's new channels will launch in the Autumn.Changes to the line-up
On 27 May 2005, E4 left the Top Up TV roster in order to become a free-to-air channel. It went free-to-air for Big Brother 6 which would boost the channel's initial ratings. E4 was replaced on Top Up TV by British Eurosport which began broadcasting on the platform on June 1 2005 [link].Between early 2005 and August 2005, non-subscribers to Top Up TV could view a sample of the channels transmitted on the service on the Xtraview service for £1 a day — the Top Up channels were transmitted in two hour slots throughout the day, and a release code could be obtained by telephoning Top Up TV. In August 2005 the service was discontinued, for a time afterwards the Prepay Top Up TV Pay As You Go service appeared offering viewing for £2 a day, which has now also been discontinued.
On 30 July 2005 Setanta Sports channel began to broadcast live pay-per-view Scottish Premier League games in conjunction with Top Up TV. The service uses Top Up TV’s patented Xtraview technology. Initially this was only available in the Scottish and Grampian ITV regions. On 22 January 2006 this channel was made available to the rest of the UK. This channel is currently available to all owners of compatible Freeview receivers. [link]
On 13 March 2006, Top Up TV launched "Top Up TV Active" on Freeview channel 107 persuading viewers to purchase Top Up TV. It is a basic MHEG application which did have an audio stream, but has since vanished. It is similar to the Top Up TV Sampler Channel from December 2004 to February 2005 in that it informs the viewers how to subscribe and what they'll get.
Top Up TV Active
Top Up TV Active is an interactive channel detailing the channels available on the Top Up TV service on channel 107. It contains information such as terms and conditions, channels available and how to subscribe. The channel has a low quality audio stream, which advertises the service and is also used to broadcast an audio version of Quizworld (see below). Top Up TV Active now features Say So during the day, and Quizworld in the evenings, run by Cellcast and Top Up TV. Say So has interactive features including the ability to put your message or picture on screen via SMS. Also, an audio version of Quizworld is broadcast on most nights, using Cellcast's technology to broadcast the audio and pictures (of puzzles, photographs etc) simultaneously. This is in addition to the Quizworld broadcast on SmileTV, which Top Up TV also has a connection with. Some other features including brain teasers and horoscopes will launch in the near future.["Cellcast launches new programming on Freeview and pioneers new 'visual radio' on digital terrestrial television"] by Cellcast plc, May 12, 2006, retrieved May 13, 2006Channels
On air time in brackets. Information as of May 2006. Channels marked # require an additional subscription or are pay-per-view.- 17 - UKTV Gold (12:00–05:00)
- 25 - Turner Classic Movies - (19:00–05:00)
- 26 - UKTV Style - (18:00–23:00)
- 27 - Discovery Channel - (12:00–00:00)
- 28 - Discovery Real Time - (06:00–12:00)
- 29 - UKTV Food - (09:00–12:30)
- 33 - British Eurosport - (12:30–23:00)
- 34 - Setanta Sports# (Scottish Premier League matches, dependent on match times)
- 72 - Cartoon Network - (06:00–18:00)
- 73 - Boomerang - (05:00–12:00)
- 74 - Toonami - (05:00–09:00 weekends only)
- 84 - Bloomberg Television - (05:00–09:00 weekdays only)
- 97 - Television X# - (23:00–05:00)
- 98 - Red Hot TV# - (23:00–04:00) Although not part of the formal Top Up TV channel line-up, Top Up TV does supply the channel space, encryption and payment services for Red Hot and thus allows it to broadcast on the digital terrestrial service.
- 107 - Top Up TV Active
References and notes
External links
- [Top Up TV]
- [Top Up TV Pay As You Go]
- [General news & information site, deeteetee]
- [Digital Spy forum on Top Up TV]
- [Ofcom licence details for Top Up TV Active]
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