We’ve all grown very used to how to make a television work. Get a licence, aerial and TV. Simple. The government has decided to really complicate this. The ‘old’ system uses analogue signals which are very forgiving when things not tuned correctly or aerial not pointing correctly and yet will still work. 2012 the analogue transmitters will be closed down. This is so the government can sell the radio spectrum. They don’t know what this radio spectrum will be sold for yet, but after making £21billion from selling radio spectrum for 3G phones they’re sure they want another sale. So everyone and anyone who uses a TV will have to buy a set top box or new digital TV and potentially a new aerial, etc.
Southwark Council controls 55,000 properties. All these properties need to have solutions to this government created problem before 2012. Estimates of what this cost vary but it will cost several tens of millions of pounds.
Is this something you think the country needs to be worrying about now?
Sadly the 3G phone people have been licking the wounds from that 3G auction. No one in business will pay such ridiculous prices again. So the premise of closing the analogue transmitters seems false.
This is effectively a regressive digital tax – i.e. the poorest pay a higher proportion of income buying set top boxes/digital Televisions compared to the richest to still have access to TV. We will all pay for every council in the country being partly distracted from delivering crucial services while they sort this unnecessary pickle out.
Good point. I have been a bit annoyed about this for quite some time, and don’t know why more people aren’t kicking up a fuss. It’s not so much that getting digital TV is expensive (it’s a tenner for the cheapest boxes now, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they were giving them away before too long), it’s other problems both technological and a bit more “philosophical.”
Technologically the bloody boxes don’t work! My cheap set top box is a pain to tune, loses signal completely, and is much slower to change channels than my analogue. The interactive stuff is way slower than teletext, and I honestly can’t tell the difference in picture quality. Also, unless you have a good TV with more than one SCART socket, you can’t plug in a DVD player at the same time, meaning constant switching around of appliances.
Now they tell us, having kept it suspiciously quiet til now, that VCRs won’t work and that we’ll have to pay for “Digital TV recorders,” which is the slightly more worrying bit about the whole thing – government making stuff we’ve bought obsolete without asking us first. I admit that billions in the coffers for selling off frequencies is nice, but you’re right, I doubt we’ll see the same sums as with 3G, and here we are forcing people to get rid of perfectly workable technologies and replace them with things they don’t want or need. All very irritating.
Rick