London DSO

Probably a bit different these days with Wales in the mix.

Not sure whether Wales is classed as an official C4 region - might fall under the South/East.

It does, via the legacy HTV West/Wales connection I suspect

http://www.channel4sales.com/data/macro_map

It might be seen as a bit of a PR failure though. Anyone who had any kind of problems when their region switched won't be happy to be told they MUST retune again or lose channels.

Oh right. Well LEMNUS it is!

All Freeview viewers really ought to get into the habit of re-tuning on a fairly regular basis if they want to watch new channels as and when they appear. If you tuned your TV in on DSO day and never touched it again for years you'd end up missing out. So, unless they're content with an outdated and incomplete selection of channels, they'd have to deal with re-tuning problems at some point, wouldn't they?

Retuning for some in overlap areas is fraught with hazards. You can end up with weaker adjacent transmissions on the primary LCNs, and the 'wanted' channels ditched to 800+ zone. Some have to keep the aerial lead out until a certain point during the scan, others the opposite. It's all rather a mess, and can be confusing even for the technically savvy. More recent receivers (12-18 months old) are able to flag any regional duplicates, and ask the user which version they wish to store on the primary LCNs, but obviously these receivers are still very much in the minority.

I know, Mark. I'm in one such area. Left to itself my Freeview equipment would put BBC1 Wales on LCN 001 instead of BBC1 North West, and so on. I've bought myself a cheap attenuator which I plug in when re-scanning, which cures the problem. I take your point that for most people in such areas, re-tuning is a nightmare, but it's still the case that if those people want to watch new channels as they emerge, they *will* have to re-tune at some stage; they can't avoid it forever unless they want an outdated/incomplete selection of channels. I'm just suggesting that advising people to do a re-tune now even if they don't necessarily need it, might not be such a bad thing. New channels have launched on Freeview since we in the NW went through DSO in 2009, so I know people would benefit from a re-tune even if it means a bit of a hassle.

Surely it depends on the individual and whether they want or would even notice that new channel(s) are available. If someone who had retuned last month, did so again because a nice little robot told them to during Countdown and the only differences after the retune were that they could now receive Gay Rabbit and their regional variations were all to cock, they wouldn't be very happy. "I can't watch this rubbish, where's the football?" they might say.

I have spent many years shaking my head over the utterly non-technical behaviour of the average viewer. In the far-gone 405 days, people would happily watch grainy pictures with sound-on-vision because they had no idea how to use the fine tuning. Come colour and they'd hurl the colour knob to the end of its travel and watch everything with maximum saturation. Aerials would fall off the roof without anyone noticing, even though the ghosting and noise might have indicated a problem. Come widescreen and the average viewer regularly watches in the wrong aspect ratio because they somehow set it that way when they bought the set and now have no idea how to change it. Nor how to stop "people talking all over the plays" when they've accidentally activated audio description.

So what makes you think anybody's every going to retune if they don't have to? (And if the reason is to get a version of Shopping +1, you can well understand why they might not bother....)

Hence why a periodic national re-tuning campaign might not be such a bad idea. If people don't think they need to re-tune then they never will. It's not like days gone by when once you tuned in Channel 4 you needn't touch it again until Channel 5 came along in 1997. Channels are coming and going all the time, and your suggestion that they're all crap and not worth the effort is not going to last forever - at some point something like BBC2 HD is going to come along and you can be sure that people will want to watch that. Sometimes people need a nudge to do things. If someone never re-tunes ever again, they're certainly going to miss out in the long run and it defeats part of the object of switching to digital, i.e. to give people more choice.

Good London Tonight report on switchover including inside shots of Crystal Palace, transmitter fans!

http://www.itv.com/news/london/story/2012-03-27/digital-switchover/
(top video)