Early digital TV

[samfox]

I remember this time well, and having arguments with my friends that Telewest Digital was better than Sky Digital at that time. In fairness the very basic VOD that Telewest offered later on in its life was arguable a pro over Sky at the time. But thats an argument for another time ha ha.

What was the 2005 Pin-code disaster? I haven't heard of that!

One of the main things that switched us over from Sky to Virgin in 2007 was video on demand. I can't express to you what a leap forward that felt like at the time - streaming was in its infancy at this point. The idea I could go into the EPG and have a programme fed to me in broadcast quality was just revolutionary.

Sky were quite late to the game with VOD. I remember they had a pseudo VOD system for a time where content was physically recorded onto a chunk of the Sky+ hard drive - limiting what you could use for your own recordings - but it wasn't until broadband speeds on the Openreach network got up to scratch that it really took off.

I only even noticed Anytime existed when I first got Sky+HD and later when my son used it to watch iCarly in HD before Nickelodeon HD was launched ?

Same here, I remember moving in to a flat share in late 2006/7, and one of the girls had Virgin tv. I remember with amazement when I discovered I could binge watch the first series of “Life on Mars” and catch up on the previous episode that I had missed. Then following week visiting my parents and trying to find a similar catch-up function on their Sky+ box to and being sorely disappointed. I still haven’t gotten around to introducing my dad to that series :?

I think that might have even been before iPlayer rolled out publicly? (Was it called BBC player back then?) I had a friend who was a beta tester on the original iPlayer software which he had to download, and remember it used p2p type connection to download the drm BBC shows. From memory I also think he had to have an “always on” active internet connection in order to watch content too.