BBC,ITV,ch4 and ch5 move to new Freely streaming service on smart tvs,early next year.
They'll be available in streaming. They are not moving there,
Quite right Jim,loose use of language,always good to be corrected.
Excuse the ignorance, but will these be available in Ireland too? Or will a VPN be needed?
Very unlikely to be available on an Irish IP. I'd say the days of us (legally) receiving UK linear television are coming to an end.
Very misleading title, Terrestrial TV is not moving anywhere, in the UK or here in Ireland
And Freely will be geoblocked anyway
And of course, these services exist online anyway on the various platforms like the iPlayer, ITVX etc.
freeview play also exists on many uk sets, it’s probably tidying all that up into one user friendly platform.
Think it may also have downloads,and a few extras,but how to pay for it?
No shutdown till at least 2030. WRC23 meeting later this year might agree to extend the protection for whats left of the current bandwidth for terrestrial tv beyond this date.
Don't suppose Txs would be shut down, in the coming years to switch over to the net,if ever,but perhaps would result in savings.?
Freely,to launch in 2024 as discussed will be run by Everyone tv.co.uk.A tv licence will be required,£169.50,
A new Smart TV will be required ,at the moment only Hisense has said t will be making TVs with freely built in.
There are no plans to add it to Fire or Roku,or make it backwards compatible so it can work on existing TVs.
It will come with Freemoji,if you can't find anything to watch.
Computer Active magazine January issue.
Freely aiming for a Q2 launch according to RXTV.
I wonder will we in Ireland be able to access it? Probably as long as it’s on satellite!
As it's the intended replacement to satellite and terrestrial then satellite or overspill Freeview reception alone won't be enough.
It's likely that the platform will require internet connectivity to function at all - the modern equivalent of the default transponder if you will - and it's almost guaranteed that this would be geoblocked to UK only.
So that’s the end of uk tv here really!
Nonsense.
have you read any of the posts here at all?
ITV,CH5 wont be available so maybe just restricted to BBC and CH4 of the main UK terrestrial channels!
The talk of the demise of satellite TV in here is greatly over-exaggerated imo.
People need to remember that as a concept Freesat was only ever intended to be a means of ensuring TV coverage is available in Freeview black spots (exactly the same as Soarsat is to us). However, Freesat grew legs as a drop-in replacement for the existing install base of Sky subscribers.
Freely can't be a replacement service for Freesat until every single household in the UK can get a data connection of a sufficient quality - no matter how remote they are. Until that day comes, there will still be the need for an infill service, i.e. Freesat.
Sky's contract with Astra runs until 2028. Sky may be winding down it's satellite business for new customers, but there are still millions of existing Sky satellite users. To say that it would be a tough ask to transition all of these customers over the Sky Stream in 4 years is an understatement.
We may see some commercial operators/channels leave Freesat over the coming years if the install bases dwindles and Freely takes over. However, the bigger channels (BBC, ITV, Ch4 etc.) will be there until the end, and the end is not yet in sight.
The French communication regulator has called on French broadcasters to establish an online offering, which sounds very like Freely, with some of the suggested components. Others across Europe are looking at online options, so although the end is not in sight, the future landscape will be significantly different.
The emergence of DVB-I as the new IP transmission standard for linear TV will be part of the bigger picture for linear transmission post WRC-31, when the next big review of broadcasting spectrum takes place.
The 2030s could see broadcasting move to 5g, with broadcasting spectrum released for 5g/6g services.
DVB-I testing now could be the beginning of that transition.
Yes I love the logic of removing HD TV channels to allow people watch more cat videos on 6" screens 😜
as well as sufficient quality - sufficient reliability too - the recent storms had an RTE TV news report about powercuts showing an Eir pole, with broken fibre broadband installation just swinging about in the wind. How long rural Fibre broadband users who suffer breaks may typically be left without service after storms I do not know, but if a few days I certainly would not wish to be relying on it for TV
My fibre broadband went down overnight on Friday, still waiting for my ISP to fix it. They won’t even take my calls anymore, the “fault has already been logged”.
I am very thankful I still have working Sky, Saorview and Freesat setups in my house.
That's a reason why we'll see the move to 5g broadcasting, DVB-I over 5g, and not left solely to wired infrastructures.
More spectrum efficient than traditional transmission and probably more economical.
I have my reservations about this.
For one, 5G needs a greater density of mast infrastructure than even 4G - which itself is multiples of times greater than our terrestrial broadcast infrastructure. You could argue that the 5G infrastructure is likely to be required anyway, but surely there'll be more of it if it's powering home TV.
Then there's the issue of bandwidth sharing. This was a major problem when 3G/4G was initially the Government-sponsored rural broadband 'solution'. 5G probably has better provisioning/switching intelligence, but I would still have my doubts.
Overall though, it seems mental to me to replace the wireless TV infrastructure we currently have (which works perfectly fine) with a different sort of wireless infrastructure. The efficiency argument doesn't wash with me. DAB is far more efficient than FM from a broadcasting perspective, and look what happened there.
High Power High Tower (HPHT) sites vs. Low Power Low Tower (LPLT) sites, i.e. existing high power transmission masts vs. mobile base stations/transposer sites.
Existing broadcast transmission sites would be converted over to 5G, frequencies would be replanned allocating 5/8 MHz blocks to broadcasting with the interleaved spectrum reallocated to mobile services.
A couple of studies done around Europe on this in the last few years. Expect to see lots more studies on this in the coming years, running into WRC-31, when the broadcasting spectrum band is to be reviewed again.
Regarding interference, this was an issue when the 700/800 MHz bands were transferred to mobiles services, inward interference from nearby mobile base stations to adjoining DTT broadcast spectrum due to domestic wideband tv aerials, masthead amps, cheap co-ax cable etc. This was easily resolved.
Harmonised technical standards and conditions between these services will ensure no interference. Basically linear broadcasting will become a streaming IP service via maybe DVB-I, which sits on a 5g carrier. Interactivity/ return channel via local mobile mast/fibre networks. Broadcast transmission companies like 2RN will still continue to manage their networks except it'll be via 5g.
Two technical reports here from the EBU in 2021, almost 3 years old already and pre DVB-I. Lots more development and studies to come in the years ahead. Probably into the next decade before this could/will happen
IBC2023 TECH PAPERS: DVB-I SERVICE DELIVERY OVER 5G SYSTEMS
I'm not claiming it's not possible. It just seems to be change for the sake of change.
At it's core, a move to 5G broadcasting would be replacing one wireless service with a different wireless service. There would be little-to-no improvement in functionality from the end-users' perspective. (Any proposed improvements could likely be replicated by plugging existing set top boxes into the internet with the data connections we already have in our homes).
The only improvements I can see arising from a move to DVB-I over 5G would be from a transmission efficiency standpoint, and that argument didn't work for DAB.
The real focus of this will be to release the remaining broadcasting spectrum to broadband services and in doing so aligning broadcast and broadband standards, converging broadcasting and broadband I guess, multi-platform future.
IBC2023 Technical Paper Sessions: 5G technology - convergence with broadcast | Technical Papers | IBC
Good explanation of the snags here.
According to RXTV, a report from consultancy firm EY suggests that even by 2040 some 18% of UK homes (5.5 million) won't have access to high speed broadband. In NI this figure may be as high as 24%. So this will no doubt complicate efforts by the main PSBs to ditch terrestrial and satellite platforms and go online only.
Link to EY (Ernst & Young) report:
https://www.broadcast2040plus.org/_files/ugd/c12aae_f09b9b3bd981459b85d6409357cebb49.pdf
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