Instead we have TV which can be as low as 2Mbps and radio between 64 and 128kbps
They had high hopes for quality at the outset of DAB, but then the reality dawned that punters aren't convinced to adopt new technology by promises of technical quality. Content has to be the driver.
They had high hopes for quality at the outset of DAB, but then the reality dawned that punters aren't convinced to adopt new technology by promises of technical quality. Content has to be the driver.
I think it's more the case that UK organisations are incapable of marketing effectively on any line other than content. Going off on a slight tangent here, but in Australia their introduction of digital TV has been far more about improving technical quality than it has been about adding new channels - and it's doing just fine.
Who says you can't convince punters to adopt new technology for the technical improvements it can offer?
Who says you can't convince punters to adopt new technology for the technical improvements it can offer?
One of the big shames is that the initial implementation of DTT in the UK could have provided
both
additional services and an increase in SDTV quality. Infact, it has flopped on one and reached only marginal achievement on the other.
The original NTL Norwood demonstration MUX provided 4 services of a perceptional quality far in excess of broadcast PAL, even on scenes with high motion content. Allowing for improvements in encoding technology over the 10 years or so it might even now be possible to see the grass on rugby pitches with generous enough statmux settings to allow for operational flexibility.
In Australia any additional capacity on a mux, after allocation of the HDTV and generous SDTV steams, can only be allocated to incremental services, and a very closely defined
incremental
at that!
Without the HDTV, the UK could have allocated enough capacity for SDTV services whose perceptional viewed quality exceeded PAL analogue broadcasts, and in many respects matched studio component pictures. This could have been applied to the simul-casts and extended to the principal additional services, like BBC4, E4 and ITV3. IMHO the news and music channels are fine compressed to the level that they are today, and could even work if compressed more aggressively.
Beyond these the commercial prospects of anything else on DTT is so poor that there does seem to be rather little point. TuTV may well marginally meet the objectives of its own business model, but the small number of subscribers doesn’t justify the allocation of effectively 6Mhz of national UHF bandwidth. OnDigital/SDN managed to waste 28Mb/s with only a few more subs (and a load effectivly given away), so I suppose that in itself is an improvement.
The history has been one of both Blair and Major's Governments not understanding either the commerce or the technology of broadcasting, and therefore a load of duff decisions being made at critical times based on the posturing of big players.
Hindsight is crap, but none the less there were loads of people saying in the mid 90's that a subscription model for DTT couldn't (and shouldn't) work. Partly this was because of the inefficiency in the use of scarce bandwidth, and partly because satellite would see it off the planet before anything like a sustaining cash-flow could be grown.
An alternative model would have allocated from the six, one mux for each analogue equivalent (rather than half a mux), and to have then argued over the proposition for sixth. This would have given many advantages over what actually happened, and yes some disadvantages/
The rules could have been set that the simulcasts (BBC1,2 ITV1, C4/S4C~, five) met much higher technical quality standards. This could have extended to one other nominated new service, e.g. BBC3,4 ITV2, C4 in Wales, and something provokingly dripping in artistic quality from C5
The BBC would have had enough capacity to develop their neutral platform philosophy without having to initially buy in capacity from others.
ITV and C4 would have been independent of each other, and not tied into a regulated sandwich
Spare capacity on C4's mux outside Wales could have been used to develop the prospect of dual-funded non-english language services and to carry TG4 in NI. Spare capacity on five's mux (or even the 6th mux) to support the growth of localised commercial television services with realistic carriage costs.
rather than being lack lustre about DTT (as they were) five's owners would have had the vision of moving to a position to where they were on par with ITV, at least in terms of opportunity.
Even if 16QAM were still adopted on some muxes, enough capacity would exist for news channels and some other incremental services, whilst the quality thresholds of the main services were guaranteed. Yes - there'd even be some time allocated space for the odd retail presentation.
The costs of building the DTT chain would have been borne entirely by the broadcasters, rather than with OnDigital. But hey, didn't ITV and NTL's shareholders bank-roll it anyhow? In truth the BBC would have had a heavier cost profile, but then they'd have been fully in control of 2 muxes.
The viewers would have had a much cleaner proposition at the time, 100 quid or so and you get a box with 5 extra quality channels, 3 news channels a couple of pop video channels and better quality on the main 5 channels. When you think of it this was the actual driver anyhow, by the time people had drilled through all the stuff about signing-up to this or that, what they expected was no more ghosting, BBC ChocIce, Knowledge and E4.
OK I'm ignoring loads to make a point, not least all the history of mux equalisation, and the Transmitter Adjustment Programme. You sometimes see arguments that we'd have been better off with 4 or 5 muxes rather than 6, but sadly this just isn't true. If the 6th were dropped, it woulod at best offer the prospect of only a minor improvment in coverage to the others. The best prospect for the future is no doubt where were at now, ie proposed regional switch-overs, with a shift to 8k where required.
IMHO Mr Wathen is quite right, this could have been driven mainly on technical improvement, and we'd have got to where we are today with £20 boxes in Tescos and the CoOp, but with much higher quality DTT; at the cost of a slightly less commercially powerful Sky platform.
The root cause is poor political guidance, and a flawed vision that does not extend to commerce or technology, but then we are British.
The rules could have been set that the simulcasts (BBC1,2 ITV1, C4/S4C~, five) met much higher technical quality standards. This could have extended to one other nominated new service, e.g. BBC3,4 ITV2, C4 in Wales, and something provokingly dripping in artistic quality from C5
The costs of building the DTT chain would have been borne entirely by the broadcasters, rather than with OnDigital. But hey, didn't ITV and NTL's shareholders bank-roll it anyhow? In truth the BBC would have had a heavier cost profile, but then they'd have been fully in control of 2 muxes.
The viewers would have had a much cleaner proposition at the time, 100 quid or so and you get a box with 5 extra quality channels, 3 news channels a couple of pop video channels and better quality on the main 5 channels. When you think of it this was the actual driver anyhow, by the time people had drilled through all the stuff about signing-up to this or that, what they expected was no more ghosting, BBC ChocIce, Knowledge and E4.