The Freeview Thread

It took far too long for the regions to be available on Digital tv in my opinion. Hard to compare it with these days though as most people certainly upgrade their technology faster than they did back in the late 90's or early 00's and smartphones/tablets have significantly changed how we consume television. I'm surprised we cant get HD regional news on the iPlayer at least by now. Even a HD live stream of BBC One & Two would be good.

There are 720p HD live streams for BBC One HD Scotland, NI, Wales and England. However, the England version I can't find on my connected TV or Now TV Smart Box. It is on my desktop and on Kodi using the various iPlayer add-ons.

However I agree that there should be at least 720p catch-up bulletins for the Nations and also those English regions which are outputting in HD, then downscaling to SD such as London and the North West. (BBC London is already in 1080i during Breakfast on the NC when sign language isn't used).

720p isn't proper HD, it's just slightly better SD in my opinion. When you get used to watching tv at 1080p you notice the difference of anything less straight away.

It's still classed as HD. Compared to 576i or the 480p iPlayer streams, it's still a big improvement

It is an improvement sure, but it's still slow progress. It can't be that hard to run/offer a full HD live stream can it?

Going from analogue to digital was a much bigger shift than SD to HD. Back then it was doing things that have always been done that way with something totally new. That and the platforms used to broadcast were in their infancy and no-one knew how what form digital TV was going to take in the long term.

With HD it's more a case of just upgrading what's there - everything's digital, it just needs to be a different type of digital! The issue is more that they have to duplicate or replace infrastructure that in some cases is only a few years old

It's not a matter of how hard it is, it's a matter of cost.


They could easily tell the encoders to use 1080 tomorrow if they wanted to, but they would also have to increase the bitrate to accomodate the higher resolution without degrading the picture quality. Doing so uses more bandwidth, which the content delivery networks charge more for. That would mean they need a larger portion of TV license funds to operate the service, which isn't an option.

I remember reading a blog post not long back on the BBC website explaining the introduction of 50 frames per second streams, and it stated that they had considered switching to 1080 instead. However they found that viewers saw a greater jump in picture quality by changing from 25 to 50 fps compared to increasing the resolution, so that's what they went with.

I quite often watch iPlayer's 720p50 streams on Chromecast on my TV, and I only see a small difference between that and the Freeview HD channels - and I'm someone who's really fussy about picture quality.

If only the people making the shows felt that way, rather than sticking a 25p film look on everything these days.

The ball is almost on the other foot these days. When digital tv launched, broadcasters were firmly ahead of the viewers in terms of technology, these days I think viewers are ahead of the broadcasters to some degree (I.e. Can view 4K but it's not offered by broadcasters).

Also when it comes to 720p vs 1080i, does the fact that each field of 1080i is actually only 540 lines have some sort of effect on percieved quality, especially when there's movement? When you convert 1080i to 720p, aren't you effectively scaling 540 up to 720 so not actually losing any vertical resolution (though of course reducing the 1920 or 1440 horizontal resultion down to 1280)?

1080i is interlaced resolution, which doesn't bode well especially with fast paced images. It creates a blurred effect that smears the screen.

720p has a less refined image but can hold its own with a consistent progressive resolution.

I never really bought that whole argument about 1080i handling fast paced images. On my tv there is no blur when it comes to fast moving images such as an NFL, Premiere League or even NASCAR (if you want fast moving images).

I imagine 1080i did blur in the beginning but as US stations upgrade to second and third generation encoders that they will be able to handle blurred images.