Tom Betts, the COO of ITV‘s consumer division is confident that the company’s Freesat, a new free digital satellite service that will feature a number of BBC and ITV channels, will be a success in the U.K. digital television market.

ITV recently announced it was joining forces with the BBC to launch Freesat which will give households in areas that cannot gain access to Freeview, the hugely popular digital terrestrial television service, a digital alternative to BSkyB, which has also launched a Freesat service in the last year, to complement its pay-TV packages.

“What we have done with Freesat is effectively provide a technology to those areas that cannot receive Freeview,” Betts said. “Depending on what figures you read, that equates to about 25-28 percent of the United Kingdom geographically cannot receive Freeview. They tend to be the more outlying rural areas, therefore, also not reached by cable. Therefore, the alternative to analog to date, has been establishing a relationship with BSkyB. The idea of Freesat is to give those households an alternative, which is modeled very closely on the Freeview offer itself.”

An exclusive in-depth interview with Tom Betts can be found in the Sept. 19 issue of Satellite News. For more information about subscribing to Access Intelligence’s satellite newsletters, check out our Web site at https://www.satellitetoday.com.