Sky Digital Information Channel - October 1998

Here is some extremely rare footage of the Sky Digital Information Channel, broadcast on the analogue Sky service in late 1998, including some never-before-seen clips of the channel in action. Credit to 'steeviebops' of the 'HackTV Club' Discord Server for sourcing this footage from a VHS tape...

[@rocon86]

When you actually got things like sky teletext, interactive games and good red button content. Don't get any of that nowadays. Hasn't stopped the price from going up.

[@trishayoung6373]

I had sky when my daughter was little ,she's now 33 and we still have sky

[@xjay1234]

Me and your daughter same age - I remember when our household got Sky when I was 9/10 years old - time!
Now it is all about the dodgy box lol

[@jameslovestokyo]

"Sky Television is leading television into the new millennium ... simply complete the enclosed contract and return them in the prepaid envelope." 🤣

[@matthall3077]

Sky Digital Never Had ITV Until November 2001

[@johnking5174]

That was due to ITV being so stubborn, only placing their channels on On Digital, later ITV Digital - Sky said it was madness, as Sky was available to way more homes than On Digital. When they knew their ITV Digital was collapsing, they had to launch on Sky.

[@rtc9063]

Can someone explain why in 2023 we are still paying £10 a month to get channels in HD?

[@Xofttam]

Greeeeeeed

[@chriswathen9612]

Ah early digital TV...when 'digital quality' was apparently a standard which meant an improvement in broadcast quality even though it may not have been. Since it launched around the same time as DVD was taking off which was a step change in quality from VHS, the idea that broadcast digital used the same MPEG2 standard implied 'DVD Quality' when it was anything but. A lot of early digital TV suffered from terrible artifacting on fast moving images with encoders of the era not being able to encode real time to MPEG2 particularly efficiently. Then as the broadcasters realised they could compress ever more channels into the same multiplexes by dropping bitrates without having to pay for more capacity the problem got even worse (and still is today on some Freeview channels). Can't argue on features like the EPG or the overall channel choice, but for actual quality a decent analogue setup was far superior. I don't think I ever saw an actual improvement in transmission quality vs good analogue reception until HD launched and increased the resolution.

[@castle6742]

We're dont go whith sky digital at first we're what whith telewest digital

[@jporritt]

I wonder when they started giving the boxes away free?

[@johnking5174]

When Sky Digital launched. Murdoch did the same with the original Sky launch in 1989

[@BenceVass11]

Why was this originally encrypted?