ITV D O G

Tonight ITV HD ident corrected on both Freeview and Freesat platforms…....just checked and ITV SD on Freeview has a D O G. Quite translucent but there. I actually don’t mind it but I know many won’t.

ITV has never had a DOG until yesterday. The HD channel howeverr has always had one.

UTV has been carrying a DOG for some time. and I believe STV may well also do so.

I must admit despite being initially “WTF?” at the font, I love the new look, and they’ve managed a great job to rebrand practically everything virtually overnight. It has its’ own proper, consistent identity now, and has clearly been designed with the new all-digital era in mind.

On the football last night the logo looked a little odd next to the word sport. Maybe the itv needs to be on a different coloured area to the word sport or there needs to be more of a space between the two.
To be honest channel ID DOGs were useful in the analogue age of television to tell you which channel you are viewing but in the digital age you have the EPG to do it for you.

Amazing how ITV felt that after 57 years, people still needed to be told where their flagship channel was(!)

You don’t need DOGs at all. In the digital era, the digibox tells you, and in the analogue era, Peter, there was a maximum of FIVE channels. If you couldn’t tell which channel you were watching… well, you’ve gotta wonder.

DOGs are NEVER useful, especially since they only appear once you’ve arrived at that channel!

If ITV had a brain, not only would they not have brought one in on ITV, but they’d have ditched them all for the others, or at least gone the Sky route and made them fade out after 20 seconds. I never thought Sky would do anything like that, but kudos to them for doing so.

Hmm, I will have a proper look when I go downstair but, to be honest, I have not noticed a DOG on ITV and another thing, they have stopped calling it ITV1. Also on HD they have stopped show ITV HD in the commercial break boards. I do like the new logo though.

The days of the old sky analogue the channel numbers varied from box to box. So it was useful then.

It is still useful at times. Anyone who spends significant time staying hotels will understand how difficult it is to know what channel you are watching when there is no onscreen branding.

Particularly as there is often no logic to channel numbering on their CATV systems.

Peter – they never varied on the boxes I had.

Tim – just because a handful of people occasionally stay in a hotel doesn’t justify permanent logos for everyone. And if you don’t know the list of channels available, just ask the hotel staff. Last time I stayed in a hotel, the TV itself told me what channel I was on before a stupid logo did.

In the days of Sky Analogue, you set up the presets how you liked. Earlier boxes, such as ours, that couldn’t handle Astra 1D had presets 1-30 as a rule, whereas later boxes defaulted to whatever “transponder number” the channel was on as the channel number, although this then meant of course those German channels would crop up inbetween the Sky ones. Many bothered by this shuffled the channel line up to remove them, I just put them at the end as I realised quite quickly it didn’t really matter that the channels were in German.

Anyway.

I don’t mind well-designed DOGs, and ITV’s is one of those. It’s unintrusive yet stylish.

There are some awful DOGs out there. 5HD for example, just too BIG! Make that 75% smaller and it’d be lovely. I hate coloured DOGs, such as GOLD’s. Animated DOGs are even worse but the ultimate cardinal sin is having a coloured DOG on black & white programmes, as The Paramount Channel used to do in the early days (in the Nickelodeon timeshare era) with I Love Lucy. Ewww.

My other pet hates are showing the programme title on screen in another corner, or consistently plugging a programme in another corner. No need.

So the channel positions only change if you move them yourself, like Freeview. Right, that argument can be discounted thenbecause you’ve done it to yourself.

And if you accept small DOGs, they soon become bold and/or coloured, and sometimes animated, so if you tolerate this, you know what’ll come next.Well don. You’ve allowed the channel controllers to be as stupid as they possibly can be!