5 thoughts on “Explaining the digital conversion”

  2. The line where grandma is sitting in front of the computer and asks: “Is this my new T.V. ?” says it all.

  3. I guess it’s funny, unless you’re one of the many elderly people in this country that will not be able to deal with the change, or be able to afford a new television.

  5. I’m a bit surprised it isn’t a phased conversion like we’re doing in the UK, but then I believe we have a much higher proportion of aerial-based ‘terrestrial’ TV users.

    I was staying in the Lake District this past week, and I was a little surprised to find that the Guesthouse (Bed and Breakfast) I was staying in hadn’t installed digital equipment in the rooms yet. Looking at the map at ukfree.tv, though, it appears there isn’t yet a digital service and it won’t arrive until BBC Two analogue is switched off on 24 June next year. At that point the BBC digital services come on-line on the old BBC Two frequency; then, on 22 July the remaining analogue services shut down and the new digital ones start up.

    This is a difficult one as it’s a relay transmitter with limited frequencies available, and there’s no digital service at all at present. Where I live in the South, full switchover won’t happen until March 2012, but we’ve had free digital TV service since 1998. On transmitters that already offered digital service, the analogue services will generally be shut down, but the digital services then reshuffled to different frequencies, and their transmission power also increased.

    The Whitehaven area (west coast of the Lake District) was converted at the end of last year, then the main switchover starts in the border area of Scotland on 6th November this year, i.e. in only three weeks’ time.

    If interested, see http://www.ukfree.tv/simulation.php.

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