ITV HD was added to the Sky HD EPG on Thursday, April 1st 2010. This finally brought to an end the nonsensical “exclusive to Freesat” marketing of the channel and officially opened it up to a much larger number of viewers, namely those currently on the Sky HD and Virgin Media platforms.
But only in England and Wales.
Scottish viewers are once again being left out in the cold, a ridiculous state of affairs due to ongoing disputes between ITV and STV. As a result, the channel will not appear on the Sky EPG and therefore cannot be recorded, but it can still be viewed via the “Other Channels” menu and manual tuning procedure. We'll be updating this page shortly with those details.
Previously, ITV HD was only accessible on Freesat and Sky HD's v2 EPG via a somewhat confusing manual tuning method, which meant no programme guide and the inability to record what few HD broadcasts there are. Thankfully, for most viewers those days are gone (the previous broadcast stream from Eurobird 1 ends today) and programmes on ITV 1 HD can be planned and recorded like any other.
There's also another significant change that has been in the works for a while; ITV 1 HD will now be a simulcast of ITV 1, so all programmes originating in SD will be upscaled by ITV and broadcast at a much higher data rate, resulting in a superior picture. Unfortunately nothing has changed audio-wise, the best ITV 1 HD ever manages is Dolby Digital stereo and if history has taught us anything, there'll still be a complete disregard for showing movies in their original aspect ratios.
The first “official” broadcast via the Sky platform on ITV HD (channel 178) will be GMTV in upscaled SD on April 2nd, and the second from ITV themselves the Jeremy Kyle show which follows. What a wonderful start. The first true HD comes at 10:15pm the same night in the form of the movie, King Kong. Typically for ITV, there are only three HD programmes across the whole of Easter (all movies) so their marketing and planning department is as inept as usual. Likewise their target of 50% of all output being in HD by the end of 2010 seems optimistic at best.
Industry commentators will undoubtedly question the real need for completely independent ITV 1 HD streams to accommodate regional broadcasting, and the huge waste of bandwidth that is associated with them. Initially everyone will see the London region, but separate north, central, and south-east streams will follow. Sky HD viewers are already geographically divided according to postcode, some receiving the channel via the Freesat feed on Astra 2D, others an encrypted feed on Astra 2B. If you're interested in knowing which (not that it makes any real difference), the picture will remain from Astra 2D if you remove your viewing card.
