An alliance that piles on the misery for ITV, and gives Dyke a safeguard

David Liddiment, the ITV director of channels who quit this week, must have known what was coming. Yesterday's decision to hand the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) licence to a consortium driven by Greg Dyke's BBC is a further blow to ITV, whose own bid failed to impress.

The BBC will now take up the fight that ITV Digital lost. The BBC has persuaded Rupert Murdoch to bring some of his BSkyB channels to the party and the transmission company Crown Castle to bring its expertise. And the BBC – via a £99 box -- will be gifted a far larger market for its free channels, which have so far failed to make even a blip on the ratings graph.

There is another key aspect to Mr Dyke's masterplan, which explains why he will be celebrating today. The Government is desperate to increase digital take-up so that it can switch off the analogue signal by 2010, sell the analogue spectrum and put money in the Treasury coffers. The idea of the present consortium can be said to have had its roots in secret meetings at Downing Street last year, which involved BBC executives and special advisers to the Prime Minister.

The Government is now in the BBC's debt. The forthcoming government review of the BBC is unlikely to side with the reformers who want more accountability and an end to the governors' powers, while the corporation is trying to save the Government's face over digital television. And it is less likely to tamper with the licence fee.

In achieving that, Mr Dyke has also achieved safeguards for the BBC's future. Whether all that is enough to justify the £200m a year of licence-fee payers' money spent on digital content and the £35m a year on the digital platform is another question. Mr Dyke is, after all, the man who summed up his philosophy as: "It's the programmes, stupid." Cash that could be going on quality programming for the channels watched by the bulk of the population will go on a digital hope and a promise. A necessary but expensive marketing campaign for the new service will eat up yet more cash.

And Mr Murdoch has not given his support out of newly discovered charitable impulses. In supporting the consortium, Mr Murdoch helps to ensure that no rival pay service – such as the defeated commercial television bid – will go head to head with Sky; he can also market dishes on DTT, through the Sky channels that the new service will carry.

Nevertheless, the BBC is now in prime position to shape the country's digital future and provide the upmarket programming that Mr Murdoch's BSkyB sees as an irrelevance. So, two cheers for Greg Dyke. He doesn't get the third cheer for a reason that he, as an avid football fan, knows only too well. The new DTT consortium cannot deliver any pay-per-view channels.

Many viewers can live without the movies; those over 30 can probably live without MTV and associated channels. But the lack of sport, most particularly live Premier League football, means the new set-up remains a gamble – it was Mr Murdoch himself who said that sport was the key to popularising satellite television.

Mr Dyke tried to make reassuring noises yesterday about the new box having the ability to deliver pay-per-view channels some time in the future. But if that technology were available, the BBC consortium would be promising it now as an extra option. Mr Dyke's reassurance is based on hope rather than expectation.

In the absence of dedicated channels for football, films and music, the promise of 24 channels does not seem quite so generous on closer examination. There are one or two jewels in the package. BBC4 is beginning to prove itself not just as an oasis of challenging cultural material but of in-depth news and current affairs too.

Likewise, the new BBC digital children's channels offer an essential alternative to American cartoons and pap. Twenty-four-hour news could prove addictive to those who have not sampled it before – although whether consumers really want five such channels is another matter.

As for the rest, the occasional usefulness of catch-up channels such as ITV2, which repeats ITV1 shows, are outweighed by shopping and travel channels, which are only free because no sane viewer would pay for them. A music channel has ominously "to be confirmed" written next to it on the BBC proposal.

Details are scarce, too, about a future "general entertainment" channel. To make this package genuinely attractive, Mr Dyke will need to persuade his partners to change UK Gold, the classic oldies channel, from pay to free-to-air, and make that the general entertainment channel.

Channel 4 says publicly it does not have too much to worry about. Only a 10th of the subscribers to its FilmFour and E4 channels came through ITV Digital. The rest are cable and Sky customers. Certainly, if FilmFour goes under it will be because of its own lacklustre performance in the past 12 months, not because of the BBC consortium. But Channel 4 will be watching developments with some nervousness.

Yet, it is the BBC that might suffer the first unwelcome surprise. Digital terrestrial viewers will receive the award-winning Sky News channel for the first time. BBC News 24 will have to be on its mettle to ensure that viewers don't desert it for Sky. News 24 recently overtook Sky News in the ratings. Now that Sky can go head-to-head on DTT, that victory may prove short-lived.

Sky could soon be back in the lead with a channel that will be promoting Mr Murdoch's pay-per-view channels and Sky dishes vigorously in the advertisement breaks.

Nothing is for nothing with Mr Murdoch.