BBC Scotland channel - service to also launch in HD

What made the DSO produced boxes suitable for the switchover was that they were 8K boxes, while the older ITV Digital doorstops were 2K.

Remember that DVB-T has/had an HD variant, which wasn't chosen to be developed once DVB-T2 with it's bandwidth advantages came along. so describing a DVB-T receiver as HD ready isn't as wrong as it sounds.

I bought a TV for the lounge about two years ago which whilst was described as being HD with 1024px didn't have Freeview HD built in, which I didn't realise (though fortunately it's connected to a TIVO box). Similarly my recently deceased TV in the kitchen which was about 7 years old didn't have Freeview HD built in, which meant I couldn't receive a few of the SD channels.


Glancing at wikipedia suggests that the use of DVB-T2 was only agreed by OFCOM back in 2008 with the full launch only occurring in April 2010, which probably means a lot of households probably have TVs which can't receive DVB-T2 channels via Freeview. I dare say in 5-10 years time there may be considerably more people with modern TVs/receivers to convert all channels except BBC1/2, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5 over from DVB-T to DVB-T2. Keeping these 5 channels on the old DVB-T would at least give people the equivalent of what they could receive prior to the digital switchover.

In other countries - like France, Ireland, Norway etc. DVB-T is still actively used for HD - in face France very recently migrated from SD to HD channels on DVB-T.

Also in places like Germany and the Netherlands they are ahead of the UK - as they are using 1080p50 HEVC/h.265 over DVB-T2 (so our Freeview HD sets may not work for HD in those countries unless they have an h.265 decoder. Usually UHD sets will have these, HD sets may not)

Yes. Remember lots of HDTV sets sold in the 00s were HD but only had DVB-T tuners.

It's only relatively recently that Freeview have mandated DVB-T and h.264 compatibility for all Freeview branded TVs (i.e. made Freeview HD the standard for all TVs). Until quite recently it was perfectly possible to buy DVB-T-only displays that aren't compatible with HD. (As others have stated some of these TVs were HD Ready or Full HD and had HDTV DVB-T+h.264 tuner/decoders for the HDTV systems used in other European countries like France, Norway, Ireland etc.)

Similarly there are significant numbers of SD MPEG2 Sky Digiboxes (remember in some regions the DSO schemes were Freesat-from-Sky and beneficiaries in those regions got SD Sky boxes)

Of the 6 TVs I own - 2 are Freeview HD. 3 are HD displays with just Freeview SD tuners (one of them also has HD h.264 DVB-T but not DVB-T2 so is SD-only in the UK). One is an SD analogue only B&W CRT.

The TV manufacturers and retailers need perhaps to take a leaf out of their mobile phone counterparts' book. They seemed to have persuaded consumers to buy a new smart phone every 18-24 months !

(And smart phones are more expensive than tellies and PVRs !)

Indeed why there is even the need for this channel? They could have brought back BBC3 instead of wasting money

Or they could have just kept BBC 2 Scotland, and increased the amount of regional programming.


I'm sure they could have managed that, by dropping some of the repeats on BBC 2 Scotland.

Scottish comedian @IainDoesJokes will headline @BBCScotland channel launch with A Night at the Theatre: https://t.co/qmzXwk90RX pic.twitter.com/KU0F0PAYit

— BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) February 4, 2019

There's now a schedule page on the BBC website, though as yet no programmes have been published:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules/p06kvypx

What on Earth are those colours!? This is really turning out to be hideous from a design point of view.

Aurora borealis