Television. Now, and the future…

Ok lets start with a rant about ITV – it seems like the new craze, hitting everyone by storm. Since the majority of the regions have been swallowed up by Carlton/Granada (now ITV plc), it seems to have lost the very essence that the channel was intially created for… which was regional broadcasting. Since being virtually entirely nationalised, it would seem the BBC are more renownded for thier regional output.

And with this, comes the recent obsession of ‘celebrity’ programmes, often with celebs who you’ve never heard of, such as, “the background extra from Eastenders”. With the near axing of ITV’s latest attempt at reviving these celebs, Celebrity Wrestling, and the lower than expected figures from Celebrity Love Island, can’t the channels realise that most of the public are becoming tiresome of such programmes?

Next week sees the start of the sixth Big Brother, no doubt hordes of people will moan about Channel 4 having it on again, as it seems its one of those love / hate programmes. Knowing me though I’ll probably watch it a bit, and in the end just keep on lol, especially as Channel 4 are bringing E4 to Freeview from the 27th.

You also see the major terrestrial networks advertising thier digital channels, trying to get everyone informed and over to digital TV before the switch off in a few years time, but come on, are the TV companies really funding thier digital channels enough?

In a few years, everyone will recieve at least all the channels avaliable on Freeview now, but alot of the channels seem stale compared to the other main channels. They come accross that they’ve been pre-programmed on a computer months in advance, only for it to roll out the programmes on that day.

We all have the standard 4 channels on terrestrial TV, and if you’re lucky enough… 5. Alot of people nowadays have Sky or Cable, but for those who dont, the reality is that within the next five years they will have to upgrade to either that, or Freeview. Now, even though Freeview is being seen as a big step for digital television, providing the basic channels at no cost (other than the purchase of the digi box in the first place).

But is it really a good thing? Yea, you get alot of more channels, for free, but it would seem at the moment, that they just want to make a quick buck and dont really dont care about quality, rather than quantity. With better compression rates, they are cramming new stations in left right and center to get more money, ever while the picture quality falls to allow for the additional stations. for example, you can visabily see the difference between the picture quality on BBC1 than on a digital channel on freeview like ABC1, especially when actions on the screen is fast paced, like sports coverage.

The future of television is ultimately High Definiton (HD) and Video On Demand (VOD), but they’re two technologies which if you speak to people, most will know nothing about. Maybe thats because of the pressure to advertise and get people aware of DTT before the switch off of analogue… Well, HD, something being heralded as the biggest thign to hit TV’s since colour, sounds promising, but without seeing it for myself, its hard to imagine how high a quality it will be, even though its already in the states.

I kinda like the sound of VOD aswell. Being able to choose what programme you wish to watch at any one time sounds like a very attractive feature, but again, its another thing which I’ll have to wait to see. It has potential, and no doubt the TV stations will try to use it, but Im slighty skeptical as to how useful it really will be come the end…

I also applied for the BBC iMP trial today, to test the technology behind downloading BBC TV programmes from thier site after 7 days of broadcasting from September, and which will be rolled out publically in 2006. Hopefully I become accepted, as it is something I would be really interested in, and it would be great to be a part in something like that…

After just downloading the iMP, you can see some screenshots of the BBC iMP in my gallery; here… even though only two sections are working at the moment…

1. 

   D T P says:

   5/20/2005 at 2:48 am

   Lloyd, a well written blog which is informed and enjoyable. I share your concerns over this digital TV fiasco, but the quality problem is due to the fact that all teh digital channels are broadcast in a band smaller than a single channel of analogue… when analogue goes imagine the amount of channels and the quality improvement.

   There is an interesting idea i have about broadcasts into outer space. Since the signals will be digitally encoded they will not be as obvious to detect, but surely an advanced civilisation will be able to detect them and they would get more information from a digitally compressed, high density data stream than some crap analogue signal. So i think the digital switch over is good for SETI.

   It is sad that the digital TV has to be sold ‘dumbed down’, it will be the same with VoIP, and video on demand will have to be a startup like Napster. For VOD, 10mbit symmetric and high QOS protocols will make it viable, along with MPEG 4 and dedicated DSP chips.

   All good.