The ISP will expand the service beyond its current subscriber base of 40,000+ homes in London and Stevenage to Newcastle, Birmingham and Edinburgh initially, reaching Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool by June. The company hopes to able to reach 5m homes or half its current unbundled local loop network

Subscribers to the service will be offered a package of around 30 channels as well as video-on-demand and a catch up service called "replay", which allows users access to 50 hours of BBC telly programmes from the past seven days. The price for the basic service remains at £14.99 a month, while £19.99 gets you that time shifting capabilities and free evening and weekend landline calls.

In addition subscribers can upgrade to the 'Big Pack' adding an extra 25 channels and 1000 hours of on-demand TV programmes. They can also choose the award-winning Music or Kids packs which include VMX with 5000 music videos and Scamp the exclusive pre-school channel. Tiscali TV has the most on-demand content available from one provider.

The video-on-demand service will have a video store's worth of 1,000 movies priced between £1.49 and £3.99. The company plans to launch in June a set top box with a 160GB hard drive which will allow subscribers to record and watch high definition content if they have an HD TV, although seeing as DSL doesn't have a great deal of bandwidth to play with in the UK, it's not quite clear how subscribers will get their hands on this HD content.

Just about a month ago the Tiscali UK's Italian parent was considering selling its operations in the UK, but it said that its IPTV plans were already in place.

Mary Turner, Chief Executive Tiscali UK said: "Tiscali TV will give our subscribers real value for money, choice and flexibility - things that are core to our brand values. We believe there is a real gap in the market for our TV product. The success of Freeview has shown that customers want more than five channels but don't necessarily want to pay a high monthly subscription. Our TV service gives customers broadband plus the channel choice they want and free on-demand programming, all for the price you would pay for a standard broadband connection".

And hopefully this time the service's picture will look half decent on our big plasma screen.