Open....

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (April 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Open....^[1] was the original interactive television service on BSkyB's Sky Digital platform. Running from launch in 1998 until October 2001, Open.... was run by British Interactive Broadcasting (BIB), a consortium owned by BSkyB, British Telecom, HSBC and Matsushita. It was dropped in October 2001 and replaced by Sky Active, a brand which covers all Sky interactive services as well as those remaining from Open....

Open.... was a minor part of Sky's business relationships it needed, to create Sky Digital, then a new service with more channels without the compromised VideoCrypt encryption system.

1 Services
2 Technical details
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Services

Open....'s services were designed to allow the Sky Digibox to provide interactive TV such as email but without any internet access, an extremely limited range (a "walled garden") of Banking, shopping, and games was provided.

Original plans were to provide a dual-use credit card with a smart card embedded, to allow purchases to be made without requiring manual entering of details. This never existed during Open....'s time, but was eventually launched in 2005 as Sky Card. An SMS gateway was also announced at one stage, allowing sending of SMS messages to Sky boxes - this was introduced in 2002, following the widespread deployment of the WapTV WML microbrowser under the Sky Active brand.

While not actually listed on the Sky EPG under Open....'s entry, the original gaming system on Sky, PlayJam, is often seen as having accompanied the service, although it was operated by OpenTV Inc, and not BIB.

[edit] Technical details

All parts of the system ran as OpenTV applications, which is likely how it got its name. Satellite bandwidth was used to provide static content, with all personalised content for the user, as well as all upstream communications, being sent over the Digibox's internal modem. With Digiboxes extremely expensive to produce in 1998 - non-Sky digital receivers without modems or OpenTV licences cost upwards of £300 at the time - BIB provided a hefty installation subsidy on the hope of reclaiming it income from the system. In return, it was made a many features of the Digibox were designed with Open.... in mind, such as the modem, a second smart card reader, and a message light on the box coupled with a message button on the remote control, all of which have remained in the Digibox design to this day. Also, all customers had to agree to keep their Digiboxes connected to a telephone line for 1 year after installation, or repay the subsidised cost back to BIB as part of the Interactive Discount Contract which is still signed by new customers today.

Two additional Digibox accessories were produced for Open.... - an infra-red keyboard for emailing, and a games controller for playing games.