BSkyB has refused to confirm or deny suggestions that it is requesting a Pounds 15 million indemnity from any third party wishing to provide OpenTV applications to its digital set-top boxes. A spokesman said that "the terms of any contracts are confidential."

The first draft contracts for the provision of interactive services by broadcasters such as the BBC and Flextech are understood to have recently been sent out by BSkyB, and are alleged to include the indemnification clause. The worry, it seems, is that a ‘non-conformant’ OpenTV application could cause set-top boxes to crash – or even permanently damage them. If that is the case, it would be sensible for BSkyB to require anyone who runs an interactive application to share some of the responsibility if the boxes fail.

Chem Assayag, New Business Development Director at OpenTV Europe, told our sister publication Inside Digital TV that he was unaware of the alleged indemnity clause. He said that such high indemnification figures might apply to contracts between BSkyB and set-top box manufacturers, but in general one would expect indemnities for the provision of software applications to be very much lower and "capped to the amount the customer paid or something which is close to that." Assayag suggested this implied indemnity clauses in the region of Pounds 100,000 to Pounds 200,000 – not millions.