3 channels confirmed for Freeview HD

This is one of the issues that should have been covered when DSO was being planned. There'll be others to come out of the woodwork too.

There really should be TWELVE multiplexes from next month, the first six being instantly replaced with the newly configured six when each region (or transmitter group) is changed over.

Hmm - 24Mbs to carry :

BBC One
BBC Two
BBC Three/CBBC
BBC Four/CBeebies
BBC News 24
BBC Parliament
BBC News Interactive
BBC Interactive Screen 1
BBC Interactive Screen 2
BBC i
Radio 1,2,3,4,FiveLive
Radio 1xtra, FiveLive Sports Extra, 6Music, BBC 7, BBC Asian Network, BBC World Service (and BBC national radio stations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland)

Hmm - lovely - 10 streams of video and 11 radio stations at least...

The BBC currently use 36Mbs to carry the same number of services - and the BBC Interactive and BBC Parliament streams are already 544x576 rather than full resolution - and looked awful during the Olympics.

Even if they move to statmuxing BBC One in England, they aren't suddenly going to reduce their bandwith requirements by 1/3rd...

Yes, this company makes the modules. Dead simple they are too, HD-SDI in one side and get DIRAC compressed output that looks like a valid SDI signal coming out the other side.

So you can use all your existing SDI circuits, routers, media converters etc. to move the signal around. You just have to make sure you turn it back into HD-SDI via another module before you try and feed it into a mixer or monitor though!

Yep - Dirac Pro could be a quiet little success story. I hear that it is likely to have more than paid for itself in savings already.

According to DS, some areas including London could get HD on Freeview as early as 2009 by the BBC applying for temporary frequency allocations from Ofcom. This of course would be well before DSO in some parts.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

One thing I'm wondering is.. in London we have 2 transmitters, Croydon and Crystal Palace. They're practically facing each other a mile apart, once Five analogue gets switched off from Croydon do Ofcom intend to use that transmitter for anymore DTT channels/Radio etc, or is that frequency getting sold as well?

Looks like Freeview HD may well launch in more regions than just those that have had analogue switched off.

The Beeb have asked Ofcom (and Ofcom are likely to agree) to grant temporary 7th mulitplex licenses in regions which have a spare frequency (like London - where we had two HD DTT trial muxes in 2006) so that HD Mux B (aka HD PSB 3) can be carried whilst analogue is still broadcasting. This could mean Freeview HD in London in 2009 as well as in the Granada region.

This would mean London and other regions could get Freeview HD whilst analogue is still on-air, and give manufacturers a bigger market to sell boxes (hopefully reducing the price of a UK-specific model) and broadcasters a greater incentive to run decent services earlier.

Seems a very sensible proposition.

Croydon was originally the VHF transmitter for 405 line ITV I believe - but became radio only when the co-sited UHF plan was adopted and the UHF 4 channel plan adopted. ISTR that Five didn't want to pay for BBC/Crown Castle/NGW transmitter sites, so only used ITV/NTL/IBA transmitters where possible, even if they weren't co-sited, for their analogue transmissions. However their DTT stuff is co-sited - so I suspect Croydon will revert to FM Radio only in 2012?

There was another issue that there was not the mast space available at many of the existing 4 channel UHF sites, particularly with DTT around the corner.
C5 could not share the existing 4 channel Tx antennas at some sites because of power handling and/or different HRP requirements.

Don't forget that Croydon also serves as analogue back up for ITV/4, should CP suffer a catastrophic failure, so that legacy might continue with post DSO DTT.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitaltv/a133961/cnn-confirms-launch-on-freeview.html

That's just what we need! More bloody news! To be honest, I found Nuts TV entertaining (and that's not just because of the girls).

I think that's fantastic. I miss CNN since I got rid of Sky.

*Almighty fist pump*

Wow, CNNi on freeview! Even if is only for 4 hours... but there is always room to expand.

Now all we need to do is replace Smile TV