Who will benefit most from the Digital Switchover

Pondered this for a while as i had nothing better to do...

When the digital switchover happens, who do you think will benefit most out of the 5 main terrestrial networks?

I first thought the BBC would suffer because it would be a small pee in a massive pod of digital channels. But then if the beeb have the guts to keep the licence fee going, i think they could ultimately come out top and end up being the dominant channels. If they kept the license fee, ITV, Channel 4 and to an extent Five I think will seriously suffer. I mean lets face it once ITV ends up on Freeview and such like with the rest of the Digital channels, why should advertisers pay sack loads more money to advertise on ITV when they can advertise on the other channels for cheaper? Same with Channel 4, Five etc.

I'm thinking that the BBC will become the more dominant network in every aspect, and that ITV will become smaller and smaller as the years go on. I even suspect that the regional news and such like will be either cut down to next to nothing, or cut off altogether. The BBC will then become the dominant regional news/content outlet.

What do we think?

I'd tend to agree.

The move to digital is a potential catastrophe for ITV in particular. With many channels competing for the general entertainment audience, ITV may find its core audience dwindle to the point where it's caught in a vicious cycle of having to cut budgets to retain profitability, only to find fewer still viewers and so on. And having shed its public service commitments, it will not be in a position to call on the government to protect it in any way. Their combination of contempt for the regulatory system and bad financial management over the years (On Digital etc) means that I have little sympathy for them.

The BBC, if it continues to be at least partially licence-fee funded, will pick up the pieces and potentially go from strength to strength.

I'm gonna have to say BBC, with all the new channels popping up, the commercial stations may struggle to get Advertisers custom, because there are hundreds of channels.

It's debatable if digital switchover is good news for anyone, the companies or the viewers

We are already seeing decent content spread thinly across loads of channels, and this includes the BBC as well. Almost all channels that were around in the days of analogue Sky are now offering a worse programme line-up

Oh absolutely. More quantity = less quality, that much is now obvious. Few of the traditional channels are as good as they were ten years ago.

I remember thinking that the arrival of digital satellite in 1998 would be abit of a "boom & bust" scenario with many channels disappearing after a while because of commercial unviability. But they have increased at an exponential rate, and here we are 8 years on.

I agree that the BBC will be the ultimate winner after anologue switch-off. They have developed quite a clever strategy and genuine family of channels catering for different niches of the market (after CHOICE and KNOWLEDGE were morphed into BBC THREE/FOUR).

ITV plc will survive, purely because they have such a massive library of programmes, but their digital strategy is nothing like as well thought out as the BBC. They didn't learn much of a lesson from the ONdigital/ITVdigtal failure, and have recently just jumped on the "quick cash" merrygoround with a quiz channel, and are depleting their terrestrial channel's budget to such an extent that they aren't producing much new material.

Ultimately we will be left with BBC and BSkyB providing the only new programming, purely because they will have the financial capability.