My Lords, some time in the mid-1990s, I drove to west London to Sky’s warehouse-style offices to be given the first privileged sighting to an outsider of the then embryonic Sky guide and set-top box. I was enormously impressed. In simpler times, it was very innovative and very helpful to the television viewer. Some decades later, not only Sky’s but other guides appear frankly antiquated, and the whole EPG needs modernising very fundamentally. It is not of the
digital age; it is hard to navigate and is miserably slow to search. You cannot personalise it, and the Channel 4 and ITV channels are not bundled together conveniently. I have tried very hard to remember where BBC1 HD is, but I have completely failed; I search for it endlessly and spend many wasteful minutes before I find it.
In an ideal world, we would have competing EPGs, and we would have contemporary innovation if we did. We need a much faster user interface than the clunky one that we have now. Plainly, it is no longer right to have EPG providers also being the main channel and service providers themselves. There is a conflict of interest; others have spoken of this. It is not right and at some point it should be ended. I favour a much more fundamental review of EPGs than is being discussed now—but, in this less than ideal world, we simply must protect the PSBs, and I support the amendment.