Last December, Channel 4 announced that they were discontinuing all Red button applications, citing reasons of cost effectiveness. When Big Brother started airing in May, Sky had developed their own red button application to stream Big Brother live, leaving ntl with less functionality. ntl therefore decided to develop their own streaming application.

When tuning to E4, ntl Digital TV customers should see a prompt appear on the screen informing them of the interactive functionality. This prompt will appear for thirty seconds, and then disappear.

There are also certain restrictions on availability of this application. As usual, ntl CR1 customers in London will find that the service is not available to them, nor is it yet available to Telewest Digital customers. However, the application will be launching on Telewest Digital, but the launch date is still to be confirmed. Big Brother 7 is currently on day 43, so how much use the application will be to Telewest Digital customers remains to be seen.

In other news, ntl have made a couple of changes to channel names. The Horror Channel has been renamed Zone Horror (channel 174) and Reality TV is now called Zone Reality (channel 909). Both these channels are part of ntl’s Family Pack.