There now follows a small rant about Freeview – the UK’s free digital TV platform. For many years I used NTL (now Virgin Media) as my TV provider. Now NTL is worth a warehouse of rants all on its own but  I don’t want to start that just now it’s just too painful.

I was paying around £40 a month for analog cable TV service where many of the channels were encrypted. I decided to switch to Freeview a couple of years ago when NTL started doing really weird stuff like encrypting channels I was paying for so that I couldn’t watch them. They also did stuff like replace the History channel with UK History as if there the same thing!

I can’t get a satellite because I need to get permission from the building owner (I have a leasehold) and my flat is pointing in the wrong direction so that just seems like too much hassle to me.   

The problem with Freeview is that the number of available channels is limited compared to satellite and cable. For example ABC used to have a channel showing US imports like 8 Simple Rules which was OK. It was daytime only however.  They canned the channel because they could not secure an evening slot. I think that they must of thought the revenues of a day time only service was not worth it.

So with the number of channels limited what does Freeview offer? Well take ITV as an example. There’s ITV1 of course which is expected – it being a terrestrial channel. Things start to go downhill a bit with ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4. These channels seem to show the cheap stuff like repeats of ITV1 programmes, sport or the cheaper US imports.

So that’s 4 ITV channels. Except that there’s ITV 2+1 which is not some arty rebranding of ITV3. It shows all the tedious and annoying cheap stuff on ITV 2 but delayed 1 hour in case you missed something!  

It’s not just ITV, Channel 4 has Channel 4, Channel 4+1, E4, E4+1 and more 4. Then there are the shopping channels like QVC and Price Drop. Why?

Why can’t we just have more channel diversity and some competition? It’s just not fair.