For analogue TV broadcasts in Britain. Cumbria (well Whitehaven to be exact) has ceased using precious bandwidth by transmitting BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4, and ‘Five’, from now on, you will need a method of watching digital signals. The choices come down to through your aerial (newer TVs can automatically decode digital channels, older tellys require a STB (set top box), a satellite dish (HUGH market domination by the Sky company in the UK), or cable (with Telewest/NTL etc.). Unless you choose cable, you can still choose to pay nothing each month, though Sky will obviously try and upsell you to a subscription package.
So why the switchover? There are a few reasons, one of the major ones being that digital transmissions require less bandwidth per channel. Why should you care? With analogue gone, you can fit in more channels within the same frequency range than before. (I don’t have the frequencies to hand, but they are normally scaled as 21-69 when you tune your TV). Unfortunately, from the Freeview channels I saw in Britain, this switch to digital transmissions has actually resulted in some pretty poor quality video, but nowhere near as bad as some of the channels here in Kazakhstan.
Why do I care? I like TVs, and I used to sell and repair them as a job. Why should you care? Well I am assuming you do, as you are still reading this post 🙂 Seriously, this sort of switchover will most probably eventually arrive in your country, so the next time you buy a new TV set, it makes sense to make sure it can decode digital TV without the requirement for an external tuner. Our TV (see various posts from April) can do this, however Kazakhstan obviously does not have digital transmissions just yet.
Tags: Britain, Digital TV, ITV, Kazakhstan, NTL, satellite dish, United Kingdom
