The five year Digital Switchover is now complete – Last night, the final analogue TV transmitters in Northern Ireland were taken out of service, and the UK’s TV service is now fully digital.
Bye Bye to Analogue
So, that’s it for analogue… the TV system that the UK has been using for the last seventy years. Here’s some of the history:
- The first TV service launched here in the UK in 1936, with ITV following in 1954.
- Originally, the 405 system was used, but this switched to 625 lines in 1964
- Colour launched in 1967
- Ceefax started in 1974, and ceased to be yesterday.
- In 1997, Channel 5 launched, meaning a massive re-tuning campaign to free up UHF Channel 37 (normally used for video recorders
The Digital Era
So, what has digital brought us?
- Hundreds of digital TV channels
- In 1998, the launch of onDigital, which later became itvDigital (with that monkey)
- +1 channels, rolling news and shopping channels
- HD, 3D and Internet TV (and the excuse to buy a new TV)
We now have: Freeview, Freesat, Sky, Sky Freesat, BT Vision, Virgin and most recently, YouView. We’ve also had Homechoice, Tiscali TV and TalkTalk TV.
The Switchover
Starting with the town of Whitehaven in 2007, we’ve completed a slow and painful region-by-region switchover at a cost of millions. It’s now all over, and the part of the TV spectrum that’s now been freed up will be auctioned off to allow the launch of 4G mobile data services due to launch in 2013.
It’s not all “fun and games” though, as it’s expected that 4G will cause interference to up to two million Freeview homes, meaning a £180 million programme of installing filters to remove 4G interference.
Switchover Costs
Just how much as the Digital Switchover cost the UK? We found a report from the National Audit Office in 2008 that states the cost to the UK economy of £4.6 billion, of which UK viewers would pay £3.8 billion to get a digital TV box or a new telly. Back in 2008, it was estimated that the benefits will be £6.3 billion, mostly in revenue from new services.
Money has been spent on the Digital Tick scheme, Digit Al (the robot), Switchover roadshows, the Switchover help scheme, marketing and technical infrastructure changes.
So… how do you feel now that it’s all over? Was it all worth it?
… and are you now ready for the attention to shift from TV to radio? Yep – next up, the AM and FM radio digital switchover. Don’t touch that dial…
“We’ve also had Homechoice, Tiscali TV and TalkTalk TV.”
True, but they were all the same thing, more or less – Homechoice was originally a VOD only service, which upgraded to a VOD + live stream service before being bought out be Tiscali. I can’t remember if the VOD + live stream + PVR (for an an extra fee) version of the box was before or after Tiscali was bought out by Talk Talk (I think before, but not by much).
“Hundreds of channels” – yeah, right. Not if, like my in-laws, you live in an area which can still only get a handful of channels via freeview.
The benefits are also hard to see for my elderly mother, who now struggles to work her TV, & definitely doesn’t understand it, when pre-digital she was perfectly happy with using it.
I like some of the things the PVRs do, such as pausing TV, but quite frankly, I don’t think it justifies all the expense & trouble for people generally and still think it should have been a voluntary process, like the change to colour sets.
As for radio, they should keep their sticky fingers off it. It is possible for even the poorest in society to obtain & listen to radio for a very small cost. Most people also have far more radio sets than they do TV sets, thus adding even more to the cost – and surely we should be moving to appliances which use less power, not more – but also begging for tons of redundant radios to be shipped off to landfill.
Putting aside the extra cost of sets, or the fact that they eat battery power, there also appears to be NO consensus in favour of DAB as a system, leaving us vulnerable to being told a few years after a switch-over that we all have to change again. Probably without so much as an apology.
My first attempt at Freeview didn’t impress me as much as getting hundreds of free to view Sky channels. Freeview isn’t Freeview without having some aerial installation, so if that’s already done, people think getting a set top box is somehow cheaper than getting Sky installed. I paid about £55 for the rooftop aerial and about £45 for a set top box. At that time, a Sky installation without subscription was £120. Freeview later needed a signal booster, so the price worked out the same. Nowadays, everything’s different because of the Internet, so while I’ve upgraded to Freeview boxes with ethernet Internet access, these aren’t the same as the HD boxes which can stream a few extra channels added recently to Freeview eg Revelation TV etc. As Sky wants £10 a month just to record the free to view channels, some switched to Freesat recorders instead. I switched to Virgin Media instead and got discounts due to the phone rental, the XL TV package, the TiVo HD recorder, the V+ HD player, the 60MB Broadband. Freeview offers a few of Sky’s subscription channels free to the public, so it’s worthwhile for these, yet Freeview+ recordings onto internal hard drives mean I can export the recordings to external USB hard drives and faster than real time playbacks from Sky or Virgin Media to my DVD Recorders. I’m therefore saving electricity as well as time using Freeview+ recorders instead. So I’m glad I got Freeview+ with over 100 channels, as well as using the ethernet Internet access instead of my pay as you go dialup Internet access I used before. I’m also reminded that USB adapters can access the files from SD Memory Cards, so there are additional media centre options, too, eg slideshows, music playbacks, video playbacks. Furthermore, I bought a DVD Player with Freeview that also upscales to the HD TV, thus improving DVDs as well as the Freeview SD channels. Freeview has developed, so it isn’t just about 110+ SD channels anymore.