Slashdot Mirror

but if it's even more free channels you're after, something like a sat dish is probably the way to go in the UK.

That's the way I went - a Sky dish repurposed with a FreeSat box. Picture quality on the main channels is great, even in SD.

The UK has Freesat on Astra 28.2E. The north-western half of France can receive that signal with an 80cm dish.

I think that some content provider will goo in a free to air mode. This in obvious on terrestrial television and also on satellite TV: if you're getting money from advertising being FTA will make tour channel more interesting for advertisers than ona in a pay tv bundle because more people will watch it. Maybe for CATV the dynamics are different, or the fact that in USA there's not TV licensing is limiting the number of FTA or FTV channels. Italy,France, Austria have a choice of free to view/free to air channels, not to mention UK and Germany that transmit a lot o free to air channels on satellites.

The problem with this idea is that the US is so damn BIG! We already have FTA programming for most of our Big 4 networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox) and PBS. The problem is that they don't make as much FTA as they do selling to cable/IPTV/satellite providers, where they charge the carrier per subscriber. They PREFER cable/IPTV/satellite because of that extra income, even though their license requires them to service the customers in those areas and their radio cannot reach.

As far as I am concerned, this is totally wrong and backwards. If they refuse to put in more transmitters to provide good signal to the people that their licenses state they are to provide signal to, then they should be paying the cable/IPTV/satellite providers to carry the signal, not the other way around.

The other problem is radio bandwidth. The FCC just killed a whole bunch of it, and there isn't much left, especially now with HD and 4k right around the corner.

Posting anon because of my employment.

I think that some content provider will goo in a free to air mode. This in obvious on terrestrial television and also on satellite TV: if you're getting money from advertising being FTA will make tour channel more interesting for advertisers than ona in a pay tv bundle because more people will watch it. Maybe for CATV the dynamics are different, or the fact that in USA there's not TV licensing is limiting the number of FTA or FTV channels.
Italy,France, Austria have a choice of free to view/free to air channels, not to mention UK and Germany that transmit a lot o free to air channels on satellites.

We have Freeview+, Freesat+, Sky+, and whatever Virgin Media call their DVR (I'm one of the unlucky sods living in the half of the country without cable). TalkTalk TV also has the option of a DVR box, although I'm not sure that service is open to new customers at the moment.

The Sky, Virgin and TalkTalk boxes are supplied by the service provider, but there are loads of Freeview and Freesat DVRs available on general sale. TiVo isn't even a blip on the UK DVR market, and I'm not surprised that they're risking the wrath of their existing users, all five of them, by cancelling the service.

Recently the BBC Management have been doing rather odd things recently including trying to pull off "dirty tricks" report here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/6167078/BBC-schedules-Strictly-Come-Dancing-against-The-X-Factor.html It seems to me that as competition in the UK Market has reached saturation point and we will see constant "on-going" battles for customers and viewer ratings. Sky is trying to rope people in hard and fast for Sky HD which they are doing with some success, but have reached the point whereby the Public are sick of putting up with advertisements, now usually 20 mins for a 1 hour show and paying through the nose for SKY and they're HD channels. Trying to be analytical about this, the BBC has to fight back somehow, but without being seen to be malicious as they need to protect Market Share. Remember Murdoch does not give two hoots who he hurts along the way and will try and rope you all in so you have no other choice but to use Sky and pay him money. The alternative is http://www.freesat.co.uk/ I have switched from SKY recently and get HD channels through freesat which is saving me a staggering £339.00 per year that would otherwise go to Sky! I have saved a lot of money and hope some of you other people take the plunge as moving to freesat can only make the BBC better value for money.

The BBC is essentially an arm of the government.

...

It is much like the Obama healthcare "public" option. Publicly funded services will swamp privately funded ones and eventually the private ones will disappear. Yes, Fox News in the UK is threatened in this way by the BBC as insurance companies will be under Obamacare's public option.

There are two fallacies here, one is the public funding leads to government control and the other is the public and private funding can not coexist. The UK experience plainly shows the contrary.

Both the BBC and the NHS are publicly funded but they both have their own constitutions, charters and governing bodies which control them independently of the government of the day. The British might chose to elect a government that decides to override these protections. Similarly the US might chose to elect a government that on the one hand overrides the constitutional protections of the press, or on the other hand one that decides to create some form of public health care.

The idea that the NHS would drive out private practice in health care was the fear of many doctors when the service was set up, but over the sixty years of its existence this simply has not happened. Health care in the UK remains a mixture of private and public provision. There is co-operation between the two sectors.

The position in broadcasting is even stronger. While the BBC started as a state monopoly broadcaster this is no longer the case. Independent commercial radio and television stations have had a long existence in the terrestrial broadcasting and have expanded further with the onset of digital. Ironically Sky a Murdoch company was until the recent onset of Freesat the sole supplier of digital satellite broadcaster for the UK. Companies have set up profitable healthy businesses in this space despite the presence of the BBC.

To be honest, I find the difference in picture quality between SD Freeview (DVB-T) and SD Freesat (DVB-S) to be greater than that between SD Freesat and HD Freesat.

That's comparing a Freeview tuner built into the TV, and a Freesat set-top box connected to the same TV via HDMI. The compression that is applied to Freeview makes a huge negative impact on the picture quality.

paid for satellite with Sky (there might be a few analog boxes left out there, but I think all new ones use digital signals)

You don't need to pay Sky - most of the channels on Astra 28.2E and Eurobird 28.5E (which are where Sky dishes are pointing) are transmitted in the clear and can be picked up with any DVB-S decoder with no subscription. If you want a freeview style off-the-shelf solution then buy a freesat box, otherwise get any random DVB-S receiver (I use a MythTV system with a Hauppauge Nova-S-Plus card).

I don't think there are any British analogue satellite channels any more - not for a good few years.

Just about every new TV comes with support for Freeview

Sadly there still seem to be quite a few PAL CRTs for sale - I have no idea why the sale of these soon to be obsolete sets hasn't been banned.

I think they went for SD over the air because:
1. It was cheaper
2. The digital signal provides a much better picture than the old analogue one anyway that most people wouldn't care
3. Bandwidth over the air is in short supply. Unless your going MPEG4, then HD over the air is a bad idea. The UK has SD over the air. It's the US that's going to have to upgrade again because they did HD over the air in MPEG2.
4. The BBC and ITV have other ideas for HD http://freesat.co.uk/

Easy - Something like 20% of the UK is unlikely ever to received Freeview (i.e. DTV-T, or DTV from terrestrial transmitters) so any DTV-T equipped set installed in those areas will have a useless tuner. That is what Freesat (http://www.freesat.co.uk/), due for launch in March, is for. This latter is (IMO) likely to supercede DTV-T as it provides for more channels and for HDTV.