Digital TV (DigiTV)

Complementing your channel strategy and helping bridge the digital divide

Aim: To develop a centrally hosted technology that allows local authorities to develop and maintain an interactive service on Sky, ntl: and Telewest, without having to design or develop anything locally. Alongside the technology, DigiTV has negotiated an attractive financial/contractual position, offering councils access to all platforms from as little as £12,000 a year.

Project outcomes: The DigiTV Starter Kit provides a simple, locally accessed, secure CMS with which councils can publish a wide variety of information, polls, forms and services to their citizens on the digital TV platform.

Sixty five local authorities have so far engaged with the project and the pilots are now moving to a second technical stage - which will see the Starter Kit integrating with local databases, offering end-to-end transactions on this new and potentially powerful medium. This is where the channel will become really useful, fully integrating with back-end systems.

DigiTV sees the Starter Kit complementing local authority access and channel strategies. With its 24/7 availability and increasing digital penetration as we move towards the analogue switch-off, the project believes that there is a great deal of potential to be realised.

The DigiTV Starter Kit is a unique technology offering an input-once-publish-many ability to councils at an incredible price. Whereas in the past running a DiTV service was unreasonably, and thus unsustainably, expensive, DigiTV has negotiated the price down to £60,000 for up to 12 local authorities/organisations to publish on three platforms.

Project partners: Kirklees MBC, Knowsley MBC, Somerset CC, Suffolk CC and the London Borough of Hillingdon.

Project status: Rollout and dissemination phase.

Key contacts:
Project Manager: Guy Giles. Tel: 07973 909663 [email protected]
LA Lead: Steve Langrick. Tel: 01484 223333 [email protected]

Web site: www.digitv.org.uk