By the time analogue terrestrial is switched off, new TV's will have digital tuners built in, and will be cheaper, and in portables.
Then for the existing tv's, there will be a convertor thing I think that will let you watch the FTA DTT channels.
Also by this time, the coverage will have improved I expect, and so it will be as it is now, free channels on the each tv, plus of course any decoder box fed round them all. Or I expect the option of getting a card for the iDTV's and subscribing seperately.
At present, you can only get Digital Terrestrial TVs, but not Cable or Satellite ones. To watch more than one channel, you
will
need all of your TVs to be digital integrated, or accompanied by a set op box - a separate one for each TV! Sky will have to make Digital Satellite integrated TV's or I can see ITV stealing all of their customers - quite a feat because cable is more popular than DTT!
(Edited by SpiringUnhacked at 11:45 am on Oct. 2, 2001)
AJ
Aaron J Tibbett
Any intergrated TV's for satellite have to have a digital terrestrial tuner in them aswell now IIRC.
We never had pay tv in all rooms before, so nothing will really change, it will just be easier. In say a 'standard' situation, you'd have your sky/cable/ITVD box downstairs with your pay channels on, (or iDTV with whatever) then your other tv's say in the bedrooms will have just the FTA DTT channels through an aerial, just like it is now.
Everything may change, but at the moment, thats how I understand it to be, with convertors for FTA DTT, until all tv's are replaced with new ones.
I don't know about VCR's though. Will we all be having a PVR soon perhaps, I don't know. I don't think everyone can afford a skyplus box to replace their curent VCR'S over the house! So I'm not sure why we haven't seen any VCR's with digital tuners in yet... I'd certainly buy one.
Like I say though, all TVs will probably have a CI CAM socket built-in (a conditional access module using the PCMCIA standard). If you want to watch ITV digital upstairs all you'll have to do is eject the CAM from your main TV and plug it into the upstairs one, and as it's only the size of a credit card it's dead easy -- plug and play too.
The only problem is that digital TVs are going to have to come down in price to the same level as analogue-tuner TVs. Set-top boxes for DTT are only a stop-gap. It will happen, but it'll be a few years yet -- maybe 2005. So I can't see analogue being switched off much before 10 years after that -- 2015.