FTA TV in the UK- a lot to offer

Free to air TV is the UK is very good and has a lot to offer and its all free. I was over in the US and Canada recently and their free to air channels are fairly poor. After the main 6 big networks there is very little content available for free. Although there are loads of subchannels available over the air, they mostly just show older TV series and movies. Canada is even worse with only the few main channels. But in the UK there is a lot to offer and a good range of programming. If you didn't care too much about sports or the top US series Freeview has lots of content available on the various channels. With various entertainment & lifestyle channels showing first run programming you have lots to choose from. And the best part is its all free. Channels like 5USA, E4, Pick and ITV2 offer a lot of first run US series and have their own original content. Discovery programming can be seen on Quest also with its own first-run shows. History content can be seen on Blaze. C&I/ID content can be seen on Really/Sony Crime/Your TV etc. Quest Red also has TLC/Animal Planet/ID content. Food Network/Travel channel/TruTV are also offered free here. Film4 has some hit movies along with older classics. Yesterday for History/Science. Etc...New US reality series on ITVBe. With more channels going free to air each year, things can only get better. There is a good range of channels available FTA in the UK.

Its mainly down the fact the BBC set the thing up? Also what is it like over in europe?

In the wake of the disaster vanity project that was On/ITV Digital. Not only did the BBC help with setting up the Freeview consortium, Sky and Arqiva (then Crown Castle) were involved with the successful bid back in 2002. The BBC were also unique to their approach to DTT in the early days - they preferred a robust, reliable service, unlike commercial broadcasters, who pushed to increase the amount of channels at the expense of image quality, which was notoriously common during the days of ITV Digital.

One method to ensure fast takeup was offering 'dumb boxes' for essentially peanuts - to prevent the licence fee from being scrapped (according to former BBC DG Greg Dyke), and ensuring the BBC's long term interests in seeing Freeview, rather than Sky, become the preferred successor to analogue, which it has far and away succeeded.

Yes - the BBC ran their mux(es) at lower bitrates and used a more robust modulation scheme (16QAM 2K rather than 64QM 2K) which provided a signal that was easier to receive at a given transmitter power. This avoided picture break up through digital reception errors. (I think D3/4 did the same on the ITV/C4 mux too?)

The BBC also avoided over compression (at least in those days) so that even if you had a perfect signal from all muxes, the BBC channels had fewer compression artefacts and looked cleaner.

To answer questions about the rest of Europe, the UK is pretty unusual in having an entirely FTA (or almost) platform. In most other countries in Europe the OTA platform is a mix of FTA and pay-TV.

Germany used to be entirely FTA for their DVB-T SD MPEG2 platform I think, but they recently started to migrate all their muxes (I think) to DVB-T2 HD/SD H265/HEVC - introducing 1080p broadcasts (and moving SD services to 540p rather than 576i). However the commercial channels like Sat-1 and Pro7 that used to be FTA when they were SD have gone behind a pay-wall in HD, and there isn't an SD simulcast on terrestrial. On satellite they did the same with their HD channels, but they retained the SD satellite simulcasts. Only the main ARD, ZDF and Dritte channels are FTA HD.

In Sweden you get the main terrestrials - SVT1,SVT2, SVT24, Barnkanalen and UR,TV4 and TV6 in SD, but only SVT1 HD and SVT2 HD - as a free to air service. All the other channels are part of the Boxer Pay-TV network. I think the SD FTA stuff is the only MPEG2 stuff left on the platform, with HD (and some SD) H264/AVC services on DVB-T2, but the encrypted DVB-T muxes also carry SD H264/AVC stuff. It's much easier to migrate pay content to a new codec...

In the Netherlands you just get the NOS stations FTA, everything else is encrypted and pay-TV.

In France they have switched most of their SD MPEG2 services to HD H264/AVC - and don't simulcast, but the main terrestrials are FTA, with quite a reasonable variety - though some stations are pay-TV. (France has had terrestrial pay-TV since the analogue days though - Canal+ launched as a part-time FTA/part-time pay service back in the 80s).

Italy has all the main RAI and Mediaset channels FTA (including RAI 1 and RAI 2 in HD) but also has some pay stuff.

Always fun taking a DVB-T2 USBV tuner and decent interior aerial on holiday

(Should also say I'm ignoring religious, shopping and local stations in these discussions)

IIRC, the Digital 3 + 4 multiplex (Mux 2) was 64QAM. Higher amount of channels you can store, but pre-switchover, it guaranteed variable signal quality - whether it was strong or weak.

The UK was unique in the world for employing 2k COFDM (rather than 8k as used in the rest of Europe/World [1] ) That didn't help with reception quality either, 2k was more susceptible to impulse interference (car ignition, duff thermostats etc). The OnDigital boxes were only equipped with 2k chipsets, so the BBC/Freeview consortium were stuck with that constraint (with 99% of the existing receiver base being OnD boxes at launch).

The subsequent Freeview era boxes were mostly 8k compatible. Post DSO we switched to 8k, and therefore that killed the OnD boxes (a shame, because the Pace models were perfectly good and usable, albeit very slow, and unable to read the 7 day EPG )

[1] Except the US, Canada and (?) South Korea, who went with ATSC (rather than DVB-T)

Yep - the 8k compatible chip-sets were delayed so ONDigital (and thus UK DVB-T) launched with 2K only broadcasts. As you say 2k 16QAM is about as robust as 8k 64QAM - which is why post-DSO we switched modes (and the BBC went from 18Mbs to 24Mbs at the same approximate 'reception quality' on PSB1/BBCA)

Penalties of being the first out of the blocks...



And Mexico went ATSC 8VSB too.


South America (with a couple of European-influence exceptions) and Japan are ISDB-T (Japan uses MPEG2, South America H264 - though Japan uses H264 for the 1-seg mobile TV bit of ISDB-T)

China is DMTB (formerly DTB-M/H I think)

Rest of the world is largely DVB-T/T2.

Almost every 50Hz country (couple of South American exceptions - and of course China) went DVB-T/T2.
60Hz countries are mixed between ISDB-T, ATSC 8VSB (and now ATSC 3.0 OFDM in Korea and soon the US), with one or two DVB-T oddities.

Funny anomaly is that there is a 50Hz DVB-T operation on St Pierre and Miquelon just off the Canadian cost (Canada is ATSC 8VSB). It carries the main French services, but unlike the French mainland they aren't FTA to restrict reception in Canada. I believe they even have local news on FR3.

Norway also has a strange hybrid DVB-S/DVB-T solution to solve a major issue they have geographically. There are some parts of Norway that are in fjord valleys that are so deep they can't see the Clarke belt for DVB-S/S2 satellite reception, and don't get decent DVB-T terrestrial coverage. As a result they have a hybrid, where a dish is placed at the top of the fjord to receive a DVB-S/S2 transponder (which carries the NRK channels FTV encrypted on a pay-TV platform - a bit like the BBC used to be on Sky). This transponder is then re-broadcast terrestrially at low power to homes in the fjord valley - still encrypted - and viewers in the area have a CAM with the satellite encryption conditional access module (not sure if it needs a viewing card) in their TVs or PVRs.

Sounds reminiscient of both American cable systems and also the system set up for the Welsh Valleys.

The mux on St Pierre and Miquelon has the following.

1ére St Pierre and Miquelon
France 2
France 3 (If there is local news, it'll be a repeat of 1ere's bulletin)
France 4
France 5
France O
Arte
France 24 Francais

I've always found it interesting how France Télévisions has established/maintained a full line up of PSB television channels in French territories. Something haven't seen the BBC do, to that extent.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Metropolitan France channels are time delayed, similar to how the UK PSB's are in the Falkland Islands.

France's broadcasting regulator, the CSA has a list of channels on each 'Outer-Mer' mux.

http://www.csa.fr/Television/Les-chaines-de-television/Les-chaines-hertziennes-terrestres

Remember that French overseas territories are considered to be a part of France, as opposed to the quasi-independent status of the UK's dependencies.