DVB - Digital

It doesn't ask for your region as it uses your local transmitter as analogue does. Only Sky with it's single satillitte has the regions problem.

Actually there are around 15 ASTRA satellites 4 of which are at 28,8 East :p

ACTUALLY only 3 of those are SES-ASTRA satellites, the other is Eurobird - part of Eutelsat

(And YES i'm just being pedantic )

whatever

Actually, I still use channel 17 as my preferred way of accessing BBCi (and I'd rather we still had BBC Text and BBC Online, I don't like or understand the point of the BBCi branding, other than to pretend that there is a link between their website and their MHEG text services, which there is not). I almost never use the i-bar.

The ITN News Channel now appears to have reverted to its old hours of 5.30-9am. The only 24 hour news channel to transmit 3.5 hours a day!

Oh yeah, the itn news chan soo does not work on our tv, we just see "the itn news channel is unavaliable at the momnet" but its like that all the time. Why?

I never did understand that.

Why on earth switch off the news channel at prime time?

And now they only broadcast until 9 in the morning! It's crazy. Are they trying to lose viewers?

Or is it because they share a transponder like CBBC / Choice?

ITN used to share its space with one of the ITV Select channels, so it only broadcast 5.30-9am. In February it was extended through till 6pm, but for some reason it has now reverted to ending at 9am, even though ITV Select doesn't exist any more.

In Scotland TeleG uses the bandwidth from 6-7pm, and I think it may be used for S4C2 in Wales.

Has ITN not shortened its hours because of the recent arrival of the BBCi channels on SDN? When they're showing matches, it has a much better pciture than the ITV Sport Channel did, so they must have much more bandwidth allocated. Perhaps it'll disappear, and ITN will return to longer hours after the World Cup!

ITV Sport (and it's associated channels Sport Plus and Sport Select) was not on SDN - it was on D3&4. Only the main ITV Select films & porn service was on SDN.

I had heard that ITN did not pay for their DTT carriage when they were only on for 3 1/2 hours a day, perhaps they still are not paying for it and SDN were only being generous by allowing them more time (if they were paying I would've expected them to have gone 24 hours as soon as ITV Select left) but that offer has now ended in the face of the beeb offering to pay for space.

Having said that, I think there was the capacity to run up to 5 ITV Select services at one time, as there was always a time (at the weekends usually) when all 5 of the ITV Select movie channels were showing a film.

IIRC, ITV Select 4 (I think) had it's hours cut in February which gave ITN more space. But there should still be space to run ITN alongside the 2 extra BBC channels since ITV Select has now gone and made a lot of space available (indeed, they have done exactly this all throughout testing).

I think it's more likely a cost issue that ITN's hours have been cut, in which case I wouldn't expect to see any extensions again for quite a while.

I'm just glad that I only have to endure DTT for another couple of weeks until I get Sky back.