Digital TV Blog

Public meeting in Cumbria highlights switchover urgency

A public meeting is to be held in the Cumbrian village of Greenodd later this month, to help assuage the worries local residents may have about the approaching switchover.

Cumbria is part of the Border ITV region, and is the first region where the switchover will officially begin in 2008, however parts of the county including Greenodd and the Copeland area including Bootle, are set to begin switching over prematurely on the 14th of November this year.

The meeting is to be held at Greenodd Village Hall on Thursday September 27 at 7.30pm, and a TV engineer will be on hand to answer questions to easy any worries about the switchover. Digital Switchover Help Scheme is offering a pack with basic Freeview equipment either free or at a reduced cost of £40 for Copeland residents who are retired or are receiving disability benefits.

Residents can pay rent from the comfort of their living rooms

Tenants living in a property leased by the Harvest Housing Group will soon be able to pay their rent directly through their TV sets. Sky digital TV viewers can access Harvest’s prepay menu by searching through the interactive Sky EPG.

Tenants press the interactive button on their remote control, navigate to the appropriate menu option, and then enter Harvest’s ‘Sky Key’. After keying in a reference PIN via the remote control, the tenant is guided through a couple more steps to complete payment transactions using a credit or debit card.

A confirmation number is provided as proof of every transaction. Paul Warburton, a spokesperson for Harvest, said, “We feel strongly that it is our role to make paying rent as accessible as possible to our tenants and are always looking for ways to improve our service in this area.”
Previously we featured an article on our blog about residents in West Yorkshire being able to search for jobs through a partnership with the local Jobcentre and the Kirklees council. It is entirely possible that in the near future, tenants and homeowners will be able to pay utility bills, council taxes and vote for local candidates all through their TV sets.

Sky have just made their TV packages a whole lot more flexible. Until recently, customers were forced to choose from having either 2 options from the Entertainment Mixes, or having to fork out for all 6.

This was always a problem if, for example, you wanted to be able to get for example, MTV, the Discovery Channel and the Simpsons, but weren’t necessarily interested in having Cartoon Network or anything from the Style and Culture Mix, you would have to get every Mix if you wanted 3 of the available 6 – now Sky have changed things so that you can have anything from 1 selection of channels to all 6 of the Entertainment Mixes.

So if you want The History Channel, 24, Brainiac, and Adult Swim but aren’t bothered about Sky News and Kerrang! or vice versa, you now can pick and choose to build a more personalised TV package to suit you and your household.

We’ve listed the new pricing scheme of the TV packages for all the possible Mix permutations which are as follows;

Tiscali aim to increase their Christmas presence

Tiscali, who have over 1 million broadband customers in the UK are to fully launch the Homechoice IPTV service to cover most of the UK. The TV package will feature Sky channels not currently available on the Virgin Media platform, along with an option to add content provided by Sky Sports for an additional monthly fee.

At the present the service only has around 50,000 customers, those which were part of the Homechoice footprint when the IPTV platform was bought by Tiscali last year. Tiscali hope to be able to service over 10 million homes by “Christmas 2007″ to offer “the best value Triple Play service in the UK for those who don’t want to pay for expensive premium TV, but do want more than Freeview.”

We’ve been keeping a close eye on Tiscali’s TV platform since the purchase was announced last year – Homechoice was a success in its trial areas and it will be interesting to see how this new entry into the wider market will shake things up.

BT Vision has seen customers sign up since the beginning of this year’s Premiership season, combined with the option of live football from Setanta Sports, with whom Tiscali are still in negotiations.

It is expected that Tiscali TV will be on offer as part of their broadband and phone packages, currently priced at £19.99 and £24.99 a month.