For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment
Freeview
has brought digital television into almost every home in Britain but the worry
is that the digital switchover is too little, too late.
Judged as
a replacement for analogue TV, the operation has proved a success, with more
channels and more features than ever before. After six years of meticulous
planning by the not-for-profit organisation Digital UK, the project is on time
and on target for completion next year. Despite the budgeted cost of around
£1.5 billion, there has been a creditable under-spend by Digital UK and public
service broadcasters. So, well done everybody, now we can sit back and watch
TV.
With the
end of analogue transmission, however, TV broadcasting on the UHF band becomes
an expensive and wasteful way to cover the UK. Daily Mail readers are among
many people who have been told they have less than they bargained for. “Viewers
with the latest TVs will need to pay £170 for high definition channels,” the
newspaper trumpeted last year.
Nagging
doubts are whispered for the moment in the background but their insistence
increases. They question if terrestrial broadcasting is the best use of
resources when large quantities of energy must be pumped into the ether to
service a tiny audience. They ponder whether, if we had kept analogue TV on the
air and invested in high-speed broadband, we might now be the world leader in
connected TV. They suggest that if everyone watches TV via the internet these
days anyway, perhaps it should all be transferred onto satellite so the
spectrum can be sold to pay off the national debt.
The
progress of digital switchover should make such fears irrelevant. Scotland
achieved digital nation status in June this year, a full 12 months ahead of
England and Northern Ireland, although a year behind Wales. The job is almost
done, the argument goes, and when complete will bring dozens of digital
channels to every home in the land. It also enables the introduction of new
services albeit at a cost that has seen many minority channels fall by the
wayside.
So it is
not an ideal moment for BT to announce an idea that could make over-the-air
delivery of live TV an uneconomic luxury for all but national broadcasters.
Instead of programmes received from content providers and distributed to
transmitters, as it works now, BT proposes to take live TV all the way to the
neighbourhood exchange from where the local ISP can deliver TV to the home over
a broadband connection.
The news
came unexpectedly in an interview with BT Director of Content Services Simon
Orme published in IPTV News at the end of June. He said that TV Connect is a
huge project that BT has worked on for some time and described it as “a
dedicated television network for online TV”. He added that it is likely to
appeal to the Pay TV market as a revenue-generating service for ISPs rather
than to free-to-air broadcasters.
Orme said,
“The whole local TV marketplace has been in the doldrums for the last few years
and the economics have started to look very horrible. The primary broadcasters
have started to cut down or withdraw completely from this area, so we think
that TV Connect will stimulate new growth within the broadcast industry.”
Not only
is the proposal a viable alternative to the scattergun approach of traditional
TV broadcasting, but also it should ensure better picture quality for BT Vision
subscribers and video services provided by other ISPs. It might even breathe
new life into the YouView set-top box. It also pitches the BT network into
head-on competition with Virgin Media as a provider of live television
programmes.
BT will
deliver TV Connect services in time for the London 2012 Olympics and it is a
perfect match for the BBC’s requirement to transmit a wide range of sporting
events simultaneously. Orme said that the additional traffic generated by the
Olympics would not disappear after the event but would stabilise at a
significantly higher level.
“Consumers
who were not viewing online before will have been educated. You bring into the
community a whole load of new consumers, you broaden the base of consumption,
so the traffic never goes all the way back down again,” he said.
Think of
TV Connect as a service that links broadcasters to each telephone exchange
instead of to a transmitter or a cable head-end. From the exchange, each ISP
uses conventional broadband lines for the “last mile” to the home. Instead of
TV programmes broadcast at full power with no regard for the number of viewers,
TV Connect links content providers directly to everyone in their audience and
bypasses the internet congestion that affects over-the-top (OTT) delivery or
the infrastructure costs associated with IPTV.
Orme said
that each “retailer entity” would manage the “look and feel” of its own EPG and
the overall user experience. BT manages the enabling delivery technology and
effectively provides the resources of a television network operator to the
ISPs.
“It is up
to each ISP to secure the carriage deals that they want with the broadcaster.
If they can secure the appropriate carriage deal then they can come to us and
we can enable that service for them,” he said.
In a
significant aside, Orme noted that part of the TV Connect thinking anticipates
the launch of the YouView box: “Because YouView is a joint venture between the
ISP industry and the broadcast industry it is a perfect fit for the TV Connect
model.”
BT
apparently came up with the idea in 2009 and the company has quietly prepared
for the introduction of TV Connect since then. Professional broadcasters,
however, have been accustomed to the use of local telephone exchanges to
provide landline connections for much longer.
Cable
distribution of television content began in 1937 when the Post Office, BT’s
forerunner, laid a cable from Hyde Park Corner to the transmitter at Alexandra
Palace in North London. In May that year, the link carried pictures of the
coronation from three cameras on the route and established the principle of TV
distribution over the telephone network. Soon afterwards, the Post Office
installed a permanent “balanced television cable” to link Broadcasting House
with important sites in central London.
These
days, the control room at the BT Tower switches content to and from British TV
companies and networks around the world, including the TV transmitters owned
and operated in the UK by Arqiva, the BBC and SDN. For BT, it is a short step
from there to the distribution of live TV signals to every broadband-enabled
exchange in the country.
It is
unlikely, however, that the eclipse of terrestrial broadcasting as we know it
today will happen any time soon. For many years, the landmark transmission
tower at Crystal Palace was the tallest structure in London. Erected in 1956 to
replace the original TV mast at Alexandra Palace, it will continue to play an
important role in the lives of Londoners when it transmits the full range of
digital TV programmes in 2012, as the digital switchover completes its UK tour.
It could also become an invaluable element in improving the lives of smartphone
users in the city.
Once
switchover is completed, the shut down of analogue TV will free some of the
spectrum for other services. Ofcom plans to licence the unused radio waves or
“white space” that prevented interference between adjacent analogue TV
channels.
The UHF TV
signals penetrate walls much more easily that the higher frequencies employed
by wifi and Bluetooth devices. One part of the “digital dividend” to accrue
from the switchover could be the introduction of high-speed wireless broadband
networks that use these frequencies. Among other advantages, this could enable
enhanced broadband access in rural areas and better mobile access for
smartphone users.
With the
benefit of hindsight, we should have approached digital switchover from a
completely different direction. Now we are almost there, things might not be so
bad after all, so long as the benefits of the digital dividend accrue to the
shareholders of UK plc.
After all,
we (the Brits) paid for it.
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