Metropol

I do hope you're not trying to call digital switchover a bad thing and pin it on labour, nick!

You've had twelve years to prepare for this; twelve years to save up the £30-odd to buy a set top box (even if your telly doesn't have a SCART lead, you have the RF-thru option). And if you're over a certain age, yours which I daren't presume, the Government provide subsidised set top boxes.

Alexia wrote:You've had twelve years to prepare for this; twelve years to save up the £30-odd to buy a set top box (even if your telly doesn't have a SCART lead, you have the RF-thru option). And if you're over a certain age, yours which I daren't presume, the Government provide subsidised set top boxes.

My thoughts exactly. Nobody is forcing Nick to buy a new TV at all, just a new STB (I saw one for £8.99). And as you have pointed out it doesn't require a SCART enabled TV.

And the VAT on £8.99 is exactly how much?

Exactly how many STBs are required across the whole country?

Anybody else completely missed the point of the entire article and wish to join in?

http://www.helpscheme.co.uk/
http://www.digitaloutreach.org.uk/

I'll take that as a resounding 'yes' to question three.

This is not the first time that the entire country has been required to move wholesale from one TV system to another; it's been done once allready with the move from VHF 405 line to UHF 625 line. There appears to be no records from the time of a 'UHF switchover' campaign being carried out; the two systems were simply left side by side with VHF allowed to die a natural death, being finally switched off with little ceremony at a point 21 years later when almost no one noticed and even fewer people cared.

In contrast, the digital switchover campaign effectively started in October 1998 when digital TV first started. There may have been no Freeview, no Digital UK, no Al and no timetable, but even from the word go it was made clear that analogue TV was now living on borrowed time and that something quite nasty was going to happen if you didn't immediately start making plans for a conversion. The instruction manuals with OnDigital boxes even pointed out that 'for the time being' you could record an analogue channel on your video whilst watching a funky digital one on your OnDigital box - as if analogue being turned off was something which might happen next week.

The government even started setting bizarre targets like wanting to become the first fully digital country in Europe as if achieving that would be akin to achieving world peace - what difference does it make if we still use analogue when others don't? Don't the government have more important things to worry about?

This 'culture of fear' regarding the future of analogue was eventually transformed into a politically motivated timetable (why else is the London region - the easiest to switch from a technical point of view - being done last whilst the much more technically complex Border and Westcountry regions were done first?) which has required a mass public advertising campaign (costing huge amounts of public money) in order to achieve the short timescales and in an era when we are encouraged to think about recycling and the consequences of throwing things away it has caused thousands and thousands of perfectly serviceable analogue CRT TVs to be disposed of (not always in an environmental responsible way) before what would have been the end of their useful lives because of a switchover which has been forced through much earlier than would have happened if it was left to market forces and the engineers to worry about.

The difference between analogue to digital and VHF to UHF is marked; this time round the government are driving it forward in a way which just didn't happen last time.

Now is it because they have a great vision of an age of amazingness that requires digital to work and couldn't happen with nasty old analogue around, or is it because they rather like the idea of claiming 17.5% of the sudden surge in brown goods sales, the sudden increased revenue from all the extra channel and broadcasting licences that they need to issue, as well as the revenue from licencing the disposal of all the analogue kit which has been consigned to the scrapheap en masse?

Unless I'm very much mistaken, it was this, and not a sudden panic at needing to spend £30 on a Freeview box which Nick was getting at.

AND MORE TO THE POINT - since switchover the fab 90's Icon which I keep in my car - my Casio TV-480 pocket TV - useful for catching a bit of Breakfast News on, no longer works. Since Westcountry switched over, I've still had the option of using it when up in the HTV West region as I often am, but even that is now going to be taken away from me. Oh well, at least it's got a couple more years worth of London trips in it before it because as much of a relic as a 405 line TV.

This seemed an appropriate thread to pop this in.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11582548

I've forwarded that round at work.

I agree, I find Nick's site incredibly hard to read thanks to the choice of garish colours and that font!

WillPS wrote:I agree, I find Nick's site incredibly hard to read thanks to the choice of garish colours and that font!

He'll be delighted.