As a flat owner, digital television has not been any easy advance for me to embrace. A clause in the lease agreement prohibits satellite dishes, and those idiots at NTL refuse to admit that I can actually get cable (although there's a Nynex manhole 6 inches from my front room!). Once upon a time I subscribed to ON Digital, and liked it well enough despite the dodgy reception. However, that particular service provider famously became ITV Digital and then got thrown to the wolves by its parent companies, Carlton and Granada.
There then followed a cost-effective period with Freeview, which is basically normal telly, plus BBC3, plus a couple of low rent music channels. Although this is fine as far as it goes, I've always wanted more and so when the adverts for Top Up TV appeared I was pretty much overjoyed. At last, it seemed, a realistic terrestrial digital package of a few extra channels
at a fairly low price. I duly registered on the website, paid my £10 connection fee and waited for the launch.
The channels available on Top UP TV are not exactly wonderful, but they are incredibly tempting to the Sky-less household. UK Gold is a perennial favourite, E4 has some good stuff, Discovery is sometimes interesting and TCM shows quite decent movies now and again. The absence of Sky One is a bit of a blow, but tempered for me by the axing of Buffy and Angel, my favourite of their shows. Other channels come with Top UP TV as well, taking the grand total to 10, or even 11 if you are bit of a perv and subscribe to Television X.
And, that, essentially is the main problem with the service. Because of the limited amount of broadcasting slots available (it runs concurrently with Freeview) Top UP TV have had to cheat to get the channel numbers up to a respectable level. So, in fact, subscribers do not get all of UK Gold but only that channel from the hours of 12pm to just gone 12am. At other times the slot is taken up by other, lesser stations such as Bloomberg and UK Food.
It's not that they don't advertise these restrictions, because they do, clearly, on their website. It's just that they are so bizaare that it wouldn't naturally occur to potential customers that anyone could do such a stupid thing. Personally I would far prefer it if they were honest and Kept the channel numbers down to a realistic level. I mean does anybody really want 3 hours a day of Bloomberg? Still, there has at least been a positive result from my Top UP TV experiences. I have appealed to my Resident's Association and obtained permission to get a Sky Mini-Dish installed!
Proper Digital TV, here I come......
Chris Denton
Related Link: Top Up TV's website is www.topuptv.com - read it carefully!
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