Low-key start for Freeview at 6am tomorrow

Published Tuesday, Oct 29 2002, 08:21 GMT | By Alan Jay

Freeview launches tomorrow morning (30th) at 6am; it's expected the start will be low-key, without the blaze of publicity that previous digital terrestrial television services such as ONdigital and latterly ITV Digital launched with. If you ask for information, Freeview will of course tell you, but don't expect anything much from them until next week when their publicity in the run up to Christmas starts.

Freeview and the BBC at least now have their web sites and phone lines in place for tomorrow, although there seem to be intermittent problems with the Freeview website.

The web site links are:

The BBC of course being an organisation that can't directly promote its commercial endevours will also tell you all you need to know about the other ways to get Digital Television. This of course means that the BBC's promotion will inform about all the ways to receive Digital Television via satelite and cable as well as Aerial but "Freeview" is mentioned by name throughout their web site.

On the technical side this morning (29th) there is not much change to the Now/Next info which is still missing from a number of channels (C5; QVC; TV Travel Shop; the 3 Sky Channels).

Of the channels that have information the following are starting at 6am tomorrow: The Hits; TMF; and on Radio - Smash Hits; Kerrang; JazzFM. We also expect the three Sky channels to start. UK History starts at 7am on the 30th according to the EPG Now/Next info; while uktv just has a caption saying "coming soon" and "f tn" launches in January. Channels 22, 32 and 44 still say 'new service soon / keep watching'.

So tomorrow morning's launch will be as much of a non-event as the BBC are making of it with a marginal change in what is actually broadcasting - all the BBC channels and other terrestrial broadcasters are unchanged, along with the channels on the SDN MUX.

More on the launch of Freeview over the next few days on Digital Spy.