Metropol

So I'm now acutely aware that Winter Hill's switchover is happening in less than 10 months and that the North West is going to be first in the Freeview HD rollout. I've also seen there are rumours of everything being rejigged to form a series of single frequency networks, is that for everything or just the HD muxes?

I guess what I'm asking is: What's the plan here? Are they tidying up digital after turning off analogue and if so is that happening right away? Not a lot of specific information about at the moment.

The only SFN being considered AFAIK in the NW is for the Isle of Man, which is the reason behind the consultation to unify services from one regionthere. Can't see the rest of the plan being ripped up at this late stage.

So there is a plan?! What is it?

Here you are ...

Digital Switchover Transmitter Details: Granada Region

I have a question-why is the DSO so slow? Here in America, it's only a month away, and digital broadcasts have only been on air for about 6 years or so. ATSC is a crap system, of course, but I can't imagine why it would take so long to switch over. Can't they just do it in one go?

Frequency planning, we have Europe to contend with.

Integration of low power Digital with existing Analogue services, used up frequencies.

New Transmitter and Aerial equipment at over 1200 sites Nationwide.

Need by the Government to grab bandwidth for other purposes.

The thing with SFNs is that they would require a lot of people to get new aerials as the chosen frequency would inevitably be out of group for a proportion of aerials.

jsm wrote:I have a question-why is the DSO so slow? Here in America, it's only a month away, and digital broadcasts have only been on air for about 6 years or so. ATSC is a crap system, of course, but I can't imagine why it would take so long to switch over. Can't they just do it in one go?

The whole way that US TV is set up is different to here. Rather than having a shared network of transmitter sites that covers the whole country, the US has lots of private, single-transmitter TV stations. Because of this they are all responsible for converting themselves and will essentially just replace an analogue transmitter with a digital one.

There's no requirement to cover the whole country or provide universal coverage and as they're not combined into MUXes there's less need for co-operation between the broadcasters. Also they started from scratch with their final digital system. The UK started earlier than everyone else (we were the first country to have a public DTT system) and is now re-engineering the system to make it the default - in some ways it was very short sighted

Also remember that the proportion of people who rely on terrestrial TV in the US is far less than here, cable has been around a lot longer and is very popular

I heard that Obama chap was going to try and postpone the US switchover anyway.

Ah, that makes sense. I really dislike the American system, it's just too free-market. DVB-T looks so much better. I'd rather have 80 16:9 channels, plus radio, then 11 HD channels, with no teletext or interactivity.

Say it like that you'd figure all those channels would look good, they do not.