The End Of The BBC2 Closedown?

I often record programmes that are on in the middle of the night because I missed it the first time round (although to my initial annoyance, it usually comes with an added gesticulating gnome in the corner).

Additionally, there are many people in the country who work shifts and like to have something to watch when they get home from work. It's a little unfair to expect them to record everything they want to watch.

I presume that after DSO BBC One/Two won't be simulcasting News24, so they will either have to come up with some programming of their own or closedown.

Transmitters can be switched off remotely.

By my logic? In what way exactly is there a logical parallel/link with daytime broadcasting??

In 2008, it does seem more than a little ridiculous for BBC One and BBC Two to be simulcasting News 24 overnight. However, the Learning Zone seems completely outdated to me. How many educational institutions make use of this service? Surely these programmes are available via BBC Education on DVD?

Does anyone know how much it costs to keep a high power analogue/digital transmitter running for a day? Or is such information difficult to come by?

That was the case, but it hasn't happened for at least 10 years and many of the transmitters aren't able to do it. Many sites have had new transmitters fitted in the last 10 years and probably don't have the facility. I know that in at least one case after years of regularly being used the switches ceased up after a while.

Transmitters are far more reliable being left on all the time - just like a lightbulb. Apparently with the older equipment, it wasn't always certain that it would come back on again in the morning

Transmitters are all monitored and controlled remotely

My understanding is that transmitter functionality can be controlled (remotely) by telemetry. That being the case, I'm baffled as to how physical 'switches' enter into the equation.

Overnight TV is a luxury, a 'nice-to-have' if you like. We managed quite well without it before.

What needs to be weighed up here is the usefulness of the service versus the cost of running it. This is aimed primarily at the BBC.

Yes, in several ways. Firstly the transmitter power needed for decent reception is a lot less for a digital signal than an analogue one - many people find that they have snowy analogue but glitch free digital using the same aerial.

Secondly due to multiplexing more than one service can be transmitted by a single transmitter - instead of having 5 analogue transmitters running simultaneously, it would be possible to have all 5 analogue broadcasters using a single transmitter.

After DSO a fair proportion of the country will only have 3 digital MUXs instead of the 4 analogue channels they have at the moment.

Also, currently there are fewer digital transmitters running so collectively they use less power than the analogue ones

There still has to be a physical switch somewhere - you can't switch off thousands of watts of power using purely electronics. Telemetry is what they use to operate the equipment (and monitor) remotely... there is still physical equipment at each site that does whatever the telemetry tells it to.

The ceased switches I know about are on the old (now decommissioned) transmitters at a major TX site... when they finally came to turn them off to allow their replacement to take over they couldn't. After years of being used every night the switches had welded themselves on as the beeb hadn't closed-down for many years

Ah, I see. Thanks for the additional information.

So, it now seems that even if they wanted to, broadcasters cannot power off transmitters overnight.

They could.... anything is possible one way or another, but they wouldn't. The equipment and operational setup hasn't been designed to do it and there are reliability issues especially now that all the equipment is on its way to being decommissioned

Most schools don't have unlimited budgets! It's far cheaper to record an off-air transmission of a programme onto DVD in school than to buy direct from the BBC/C4. Generally a large secondary school would be making multipul recordings on a single nights (different programmes needed for different areas of the school as well as clashes between the BBC and C4).

Our school now records to HDD and then burns to DVD so you can just select the programme without fast forwarding through hours of video!