Freely ,terrestrial moves to streaming from next year.

Well there's also another glaring problem, which unfortunately I'm sure they dont give two hoots about.

Currently and always, if you wanted your local stations be it RTE or BBC, once you had your TV got and your aerial up that was it, you are good. Ya I know you need a TV licence obviously.

Where as if everything was moved to streaming you now have a once off aerial cost replaced by a monthly broadband charge that's necessary to access your local public content along with no doubt still needing your licence fee.

For example I have RTE on digital and have a dish with UK channels. Don't bother with any sort of broadband package as I use my phone to stream the odd film or whatever to the TV if I wanted.

But it would be some pain for me to do that 24/7 as well as data caps or if you had visitors etc. So you'd nearly want a broadband package and your phone package.

What about people on low incomes or fixed incomes like pensioners, disabled etc? It's just more costs to everything.

RXTV reporting that the BBC have yet to commit to applying to renew the license for the Freeview HD mux. If it's allowed to lapse, HD channels may disappear from the service by the end of next year.

https://rxtvinfo.com/2025/freeview-hd-channels-could-be-cut-next-year/

I hope you don't mind me asking. Is this your first post on Boards for a few years? If it is, Welcome Back.

You can get itv c4 bbc 1 2 on virgin media cable tv i presume theres still freeview satellite uk tv channels if you have a freesat reciever

Welcome back @watty always found your posts to be insightful and informed. Great to have you back 👍🏻

BBC won't close Freeview by next year, they are only one of the broadcasters using the service and they are not going to hand over the potential lost audience to the competition. Adequate broadband coverage is not available yet either and they would have to have that before they could announce a closedown. They would also have to give an adequate lead time, how long did the DSO take.

FREELY tv's, boxes or sticks are of no benefit to us in the RoI as the signal will be geoblocked, so not accessible to us without alternative methods.

You're forgetting about freesat which covers 100% of the UK population. If they keep that running alongside freely there's no real need for a DTT solution

Where there's a will there's a way for all things british streaming

RXTV are taking something that they've kind of noticed about the PSB3 licence in the UK and are running, at best, a guesstimate that the BBC will surrender the licence for the multiplex at the end of next year - I'd take that with a huge pinch of salt, there's nothing to suggest otherwise that Freeview will be abandoning HD on its platform. I'd suggest it is little more than a tabloid style headline to gather attention.

You're forgetting about freesat which covers 100% of the UK population.

Strictly speaking satellite is unable to cover 100% of the population due to localised objects that prevent certain premises from "seeing" the Astra 2E/F/G cluster, especially as it's relatively low in the sky (20 degrees above the horizon at my place, for example) and is subject to blocking from hills in valleys, tall trees, sky-rise buildings in urban areas etc. I've heard estimates of the "true" coverage ranging between 95-98% in the UK, with some properties outside of this possibly being higher with careful dish positioning some distance from the building.

Freesat caveat the 100% with a very general dish must be unobscured. The terms and conditions are obviously for the UK.

2. Great reception: Receive all satellite TV channels available on Freesat with a correctly installed, unobscured satellite dish and a HD TV. Weather conditions may affect your satellite reception temporarily. 

https://www.freesat.co.uk/get-freesat?srsltid=AfmBOooxC3DdOSha_ZREuKABNvKRjLamQUS9jIbSomJpnJggPIjJU3xT

As one of the many thousands still without broadband today and with erratic mobile coverage and data speeds, I'm definitely keeping my antenna and dish for the foreseeable future. With a temporary power supply, I could at least see how the rest of the country survived.

I don't think RTE have any plans to move saorview online, we're lucky to have DTT in many respects

They might offer it alongside terrestrial but moving purely to DVB-I or IPTV is a pipedream.

I was at my brothers house on New Years Eve and the countdown on RTE player was almost 2 minutes later than it should have been. It's fine for on demand stuff don't get me wrong but linear has too much of a delay

There were huge issues with the Katie Taylor fight on Netflix too, they couldn’t handle the traffic and it was buffering a lot.