An Irish start-up company called NovaPal is planning to launch a "no frills" television set-top box which it expects to dramatically speed up the conversion of British TV viewers to digital.
NovaPal chief executive Mr Oliver Durkin said the SetPal box, loosely due for launch next March, would be sold for a one-off price of £100 sterling and give viewers access to the 15 current free-to-air terrestrial digital channels.
An increase in penetration and the resulting rise in the number of eyes available to digital TV advertisers would allow even more pay channels to become free-to-air, Mr Durkin added.
Britain leads the world in digital TV roll-out, with more than eight million subscribers, or a third of homes, signed up with BSkyB, Granada and Carlton's ITV Digital, or cable groups NTL and Telewest.
But surveys indicate that the final two-thirds of the population will be far more difficult to convert ahead of the British government's planned switch-off date of 2010 for the predominant analogue signal.
The SetPal would not be a direct competitor to the ITV Digital terrestrial subscription-based service, but Mr Durkin said it used a tuner which was less likely to suffer interference.
He said the company needed £10-15 million in working capital to start building the SetPal near its Cork office, and that NovaPal was in negotiations with Tesco about selling the box.