Industry | 2009.10.01
ITV fields complaints over Freeview
Reports suggest half a million viewers lost ITV digital channels after national upgrade of Freeview system
ITV has received more than 400 calls from members of the public struggling to retune their Freeview sets and angry at the loss of ITV3 and ITV4 following yesterday\'s national upgrade of the service.
Digital TV viewers in 18m homes were yesterday forced to retune their set-top boxes as part of a Freeview plan to give Channel Five national coverage and ready the service for high definition channels.
But the national upgrade forced viewers to retune to find Five and Discovery\'s Quest channels, while ITV3 and ITV4 completely disappeared for a percentage of households. Some reports have put the number of households to lose the ITV digital channels at as many as 500,000.
ITV said that it had received a total of about 400 complaints by lunchtime today. Approximately half of the complaints were related to retuning issues and the other half were irate Freeview viewers annoyed at losing ITV3 and ITV4 from their service.
Channel Five said that the national upgrade had not affected its viewing figures yet.
"Early indications are that the Freeview re-tune has not had a negative impact on Five\'s ratings performance," said a spokesman for Five. The spokesman said that Channel Five directly had received "less than 10" enquiries relating to retuning.
Freeview has provided a retune information website and helpline and said that at peak times yesterday, following the completion of the upgrade at lunchtime, it was receiving "a couple of hundred calls per minute".
The Gadget Helpline, a call centre that deals with consumer enquiries on issues on a range of electronic products, said that it saw a leap in calls of more than 200% attributable to the Freeview upgrade.
The company said that yesterday it received 2,497 calls with "well over half" about TV problems relating to the retune.
A spokeswoman for Freeview said that it is possible that some of the viewers that have lost ITV3 and ITV4 could possibly receive them if they tried the retune process again.
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