[James2001]

People always suspected the poor picture quality was down to the NTSC>PAL conversion, though there were a couple of days in early 2000 where the picture quality was a lot higher than usual (but was still worse than other channels), but the captions loaded really slowly- like loading a picture on a slow dial-up internet connection, then when the picture quality went back to how it was before, the captions started appearing normally again. So that's always made me wonder if there was something else behind the lower picture quality, and outputting in a higher picture quality meant the system didn't run properly. After all, even the worst NTSC>PAL conversions you saw elsewhere on TV still didn't look as poor as The Box did (though I guess The Box being PAL>NTSC>PAL added an extra layer of degredation... and the US videos would have been already been through an NTSC>PAL conversion before The Box even got their hands on them and converted them to NTSC again)

It was around September 2000 they moved to the new system, at least on the Sky/national feed, the cable companies that still ran their own version still used the NTSC laserdisc based one, though there weren't many still left by then and didn't last much beyond that.

Our cable company (the former-Diamond Cable in Nottinghamshire) moved to the Sky version in September/October 1999, which was a major disapointment as it meant the end of being able to call for free. One thing the Sky version had that our local version didn't is that for some reason the beginning of videos were frequently cut off (sometimes only a couple of seconds, but could be as much as 30), which also meant the graphic with the selection number didn't appear in sync with the burn-in song title captions (and didn't appear at all at the end if too much of the start of the video was cut off).