BSkyB the leading pay TV service in the UK that so far has exclusively used satellite Direct to home, has revealed plans this week to offer parts of its pay TV service on the popular Freeview DVB-T digital terrestrial platform.
Sky already has some free to air channels on Freeview, which are compressed using MPEG2, but will replace these with an initial 4 channel pay TV bouquet using H.264 compression, which will mean entirely new set tops being made available.
At present there are over 10 million Freeview set tops in the UK, but these only have the capability to decode MPEG2 and do not offer a conditional access system. BSkyB is controlled and part owned by News Corp which owns conditional access supplier NDS, and it is expected to use a smart card for its set top, and the NDS VideoGuard system, similar to the one used in its satellite set tops.
Sky says that a number of set top makers are lining up behind the plan and the launch of services will require approval from the regulator Ofcom.
Sky will withdraw Sky News, Sky-3 and Sky Sports News from Freeview and use the capacity to offer Sky-1, Sky Sports and Sky movie packages.
If the experiment works, we would expect News Corp to try to offer a suite of pay channels on other DVB-T systems across Europe, such as those taking off in France, Germany and Spain. In Italy it has satellite coverage already, but might also adopt DVB-T.