THE FALL OF ITV DIGITAL
Those who call Rupert Murdoch cynical should note Oscar Wilde’s definition that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Murdoch may be price-conscious, but he knows the value of many important things. Football is one of them – and like any good manager, he knows the value of destroying a rival. Having gambled his business empire on launching satellite TV, and with the booming Premiership symbiotically powering Sky’s penetration into both the nation’s heart and hearth, Murdoch wasn’t exactly thrilled with the government-proscribed late-90s arrival of digital terrestrial television (DTT) prior to the inevitable analogue switch-off.
Delivered through the traditional aerial as well as a set-top box, DTT threatened his bin lids with its massive potential for bandwidth and channels. However, that breadth was Murdoch’s way in. Alongside the terrestrial stations, the Independent Television Commission (ITC) made room in 1997 for British Digital Broadcasting (BDB), a consortium of ITV’s two major players Granada and Carlton, plus BSkyB.
Not for the only time, though, Murdoch was thwarted by authorities wary of his media footprint: nudged by the European Commission’s monopoly monitors, the ITC ordered Sky to drop its stake in BDB. While Sky renegotiated to provide sports and films, Murdoch realised – like Apple after him – that it’s far better to own the distribution platform than the content on it. Promoting Sky’s rival upgrade from analogue satellite to digital satellite, he promised “a fight to the death”.
The awfully-named ONdigital came out punching: chief executive Stephen Grabiner said, “Sky is for sad people who live in lofts,” but concluded one overconfident presentation to City analysts by adding, “Now all we have to do is sell the dishes” – which his system didn’t even use.
Murdoch had played these war games before and knew that media was about content, primacy and price: Sky Digital had more than 200 channels
