

UK government report calls for the end of broadcast TV - AndrewDucker
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/08/01/house_of_lords_call_for_the_end_of_broadcast_tv/

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arethuza
This was a report from the House of Lords Communications Committee - not the
Government itself.

[http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-
a-z/...](http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-
select/communications-committee/news/governments-broadband-strategy-risks-
leaving-communities-behind/)

Also, it apppears to be talking about terrestrial broadcast TV - not the
satellite broadcasting used by Sky and others.

Edit: I love the comment from the report: "The Government's strategy lacks
just that – strategy."

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rwmj
The other part of this report - the focus on universal access to 2 Mbps
broadband instead of higher speeds in cities - I think is wrong. It assumes
that you can't have both, and it also assumes that 2 Mbps is good enough for
everyone, whereas in fact it's ridiculously poor for anyone in a modern
society (we should be aiming for 1 Gbps minimum in cities).

Edit: One of the comments on the Reg article[1] points out that there wasn't a
single engineer on the committee.

[1] <http://forums.reghardware.com/post/1494829>

~~~
adamt
> we should be aiming for 1Gbps minimum in cities

Without wishing to make a "nobody will ever need more than 640KB ram" comment.
There has to come a point where bandwidth speed starts to matter less. I have
100Mbps down at the moment, and my LAN (802.11n or powerlines), my hard-disk,
or the ability of my CPU to decode video are gating factors in most cases and
not my Internet connection.

Getting every home to a _good_ (e.g. achieved) 10Mbps is in my mind far more
important than aspiring to Gbps connectivity.

~~~
Retric
100Mbps is reasonably fast right now, but when building infrastructure you
want to focus non on your current needs but your needs when you finish
building that infrastructure. Vary high speed internet has enabled me to got a
lot more use from a small SSD by downloading games I want to play again vs.
trying to keep local copy's of everything. Sure, by it's self that's not a big
deal, but the internet is more than just cat video's on youtube.

PS: Ever download a show because you where trying to remember a quote?

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DanBC
This title is incorrect on several levels. Yet again the Reg mangles details.

1) In the UK "broadcast" can mean over the Internet. It's a term defined in a
couple of tv laws.

2) There's a difference between "terrestrial digital broadcast" (what the
article is talking about) and other forms of broadcast; eg satellite, cable,
etc.

3) No-one is asking for "broadcast" tv to end. The Reg article quotes the
committee:

> _"We recommend that the government, Ofcom and the industry begin to consider
> the desirability of the transfer of terrestrial broadcast content from
> spectrum to the internet and the consequent switching off of broadcast
> transmission over spectrum."_

Weirdly that quote comes just after the Reg manages to give an incorrect
summary:

> _Rather than take up vital electromagnetic spectrum, TV should be delivered
> exclusively over the internet, the House of Lords' Communications Committee
> concluded._

Well, no, they're only talking about switching digital terrestrial tv to the
Internet. They're not talking about cable or satellite tv.

~~~
vidarh
This is pretty much just suggesting what industry started doing a few years
ago already.

There's already several IP based "cable" services in the Uk, with BT Vision
being the main one; all the main TV channels offers streaming, and BSkyB - the
main satellite provider - offers their "Sky Anytime" service which downloads
over a broadband connection, as well as Android and iOS apps to stream to up
to 6 mobile devices.

With big performance upgrades being rolled out by both Virgin (cable) a BT,
the number of subscribers that can trivially stream the TV shows is growing
rapidly.

~~~
timthorn
BT Vision relies on DTT to provide Freeview services.

~~~
omh
It also provides a number of additional channels over IP

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d4nt
The use of RF frequencies to broadcast TV content is by far the best way to
deliver that content for a certain subset of programs that cover live events
for huge audiences[1]. Serving that stuff over IP would be a real challenge.
I'd prefer it if we could keep a few RF broadcast channels around but move all
the Family Guy and Top Gear re-runs onto on-demand IP based systems.

[1] Things like major sporting events, Saturday night talent show finals,
large scale news events e.g. 9/11, Christmas specials and key episodes of
certain soap operas.

~~~
saljam
I agree, it is challenging but there are already techniques which solve most
of the problem. Namely IP multicast. Maybe this would finally push ISPs to
properly support it?

~~~
Andys
Australia's upcoming NBN supports it, specifically for streaming TV.

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theallan
Nice idea, but I can't see this happening for a long time to come, for the
fundamental reason that we simply don't get the required bandwidth to the
premises.

I live in a reasonable sized city in Scotland, and can't watch iPlayer
streaming because we don't get the bandwidth (5km from the exchange...). FTTC
will help, but its never going to have the reach of the wireless transmissions
of broadcast TV (Highlands and Islands for example). Even worse is that with a
massive number of new houses going up in this area, they aren't putting any
"next generation" communications infrastructure in - meaning to get FTTP or
even FTTC they will need to dig the pavements up in future, which is horribly
expensive, and thus happens very slowly (if at all).

Until we have a method of delivering high speed broadband over the current
twisted pair, or power lines (or any other existing infrastructure), this
simply won't happen.

~~~
arethuza
There are some interesting projects trying to get broadband internet access to
remote communities in Scotland:

[http://www.glenelg.co.uk/news/broadband-solution-provided-
fo...](http://www.glenelg.co.uk/news/broadband-solution-provided-for-
arnisdale-and-corran-by-tegola-project/)

<http://www.tegola.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page>

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nicholassmith
It's a great idea that's totally unworkable right now. Maybe 3, maybe 4 years
time, when BT finally pulls it together and gets more fibre runs in, when
there's a bit more of a sane understanding of download limits and so on then
we'll see it.

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anon1849567678
I'd very much like to see this in place, personally I have not watched TV in a
long time (I am in the minority of course), but there really is no need to
clutter up the RF spectrum with what is obsolete technology. Measures and
facts like these only come in to place long after people stop using them
however, so this isn't going to be implemented any time soon.

~~~
ordinary
How well would the internet hold up against a billion people watching the
Olympics opening ceremony[0]?

_____

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts#World)

~~~
dan1234
If Multicast[0] routing was used, it'd probably hold up quite well.

[0]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_multicast>

~~~
mobiplayer
That's not the point. The point is if ISPs and backbone companies can cope
with all that bandwidth.

~~~
vidarh
If multicast was used, the bandwidth used wouldn't be particularly high,
that's the point.

------
VLM
I wonder why the environmentalists never weigh in. Probably too technical for
them (as a group) to understand, or maybe there's political implications WRT
who to support and who to trash talk. I've been in RF for quite a while and at
10 to 500 KW output for each station, broadcast TV and radio electrical demand
adds up pretty quickly, for frankly fewer users every year.

The killer is you usually see stats like 500 KW for a UHF transmitter (which
is not entirely unusual, I know there's a 800 KW in Ireland where birds flying
nearby must fall out of the sky cooked well done). So 500 KW for a coverage
area of 4 million residents where I live is only an eighth of a watt per
person per each transmitter 24x7. However ... only 1% of the population might
watch that individual station at any given time... and only 10% or so still
get the station OTA instead of cable or satellite or uverse or internet or
whatever ... so suddenly thats 125 watts of transmitted RF per viewer, or
perhaps 250 watts input power to the TX per viewer. Yikes.

Its interesting that the power budget for watching TV OTA is now roughly,
insanely, 50:50 where roughly one watt of transmitter power is required for
each watt of TV power. This ratio is going to get even worse over time. "Soon"
there will come a time when you need to transmit a KW per viewer and that's
not really economically sustainable, aside from being a really bad
environmental idea.

~~~
andyking
Digital TV switchover has killed a lot of the mega-power transmitters, though.

In the North West, for instance, Winter Hill used to run around 1,000kW for
each of the analogue TV channels. Post-DSO, this is down to 100kW per
multiplex, as the DTT signal is far more robust.

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polshaw
I'd very much like to see this happen. A lot of posters seem to be missing the
point.. the idea is use the TV spectrum to allow mobile broadband to become a
viable main-use broadband, which would set a decent minimum standard across
the whole country without the need for re-cabling etc. For those of us with
already fast internet, it would allow decent speeds (and theoretically prices)
when travelling.. awesome (and IMO more useful than 1Gbps home internet).
(note to ROW: we don't have LTE etc yet).

Today, giff gaff offer unlimited mobile broadband for £10/mo (+texts and a few
calls), although TOS states use on mobile only.

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k-mcgrady
I can definitely see this happening but not for a while. We are only just
completing the switchover from analog to digital this year (and if I remember
correctly that process started around 4 years ago).

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reustle
I would love to see the end of broadcast TV. I know too many people that waste
their lives away sitting in front of a TV every night and letting it stream
content. Yes, someone will come along and duplicate that functionality on the
web, but let's just ignore that for now. Content should move to and stay on-
demand only.

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tudorw
While we are messing around could we grab some of that TV bandwidth and run a
looping broadcast of the most heavily trafficked media data for the last 24
hours to be cached locally ? Ceefax on steroids...

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mtgx
With Gigabits speeds happening, why not? Even 100 Mbps would be more than
enough for 1080p TV.

~~~
VLM
This seems fairly likely since OTA can do 1080p and its only 19.39
megabits/sec complete with all the overhead. After all the overhead is
stripped away the raw mpeg2 transport stream is around 18.3 megabits/sec.

As a point of comparison, no one encodes DVDs and bluerays at full rate
because then you run out of disks, and can't fit in all the garbage that
purchasers supposedly desire, like mandatory unskipable previews and piracy
warnings and so forth. But a good rule of thumb is your typical DVD is a round
6ish megabits/sec and a blueray encode stream should be around 30ish
megabits/sec.

