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BBC White Paper Claims HD Over Low Bandwidth Signal
Kelten Miynos writes "According to CNet, the BBC has written a white paper in which they claim it's possible to double the available Freeview TV bandwidth by using some clever technologies. 'Doubling the space would mean we could easily have HD channels on Freeview, although everyone would need to buy a new receiver and aerial to pick them up. The key to all this is something called MIMO, which stands for multiple-input multiple-output. MIMO works using two transmitters, and two receivers. The two transmitters mean the two sets of data — sent on the same frequency — will arrive at the receivers at different times. Different arrival times are what allow the receiver to differentiate between the two separate signals and subsequently decode them.' These procedures could then be transplanted abroad to other countries with similar services."
Freeview is an initiative that aims to discourage us from watching television, specifically by making it really annoying to channel-hop. Let me explain. With our existing, analogue equipment, changing channels is nice and fast; it takes perhaps half a second. But the analogue transmitters are going to be shut off in a few years time. Once that happens, the only way to recieve television signals will be with a cable or sky box, or a Freeview box, each of which takes between two and five seconds to do whatever it is that they do to change channels. The result is that I abandon television out of frustration.