The Virgin Media Television thread

Probably my false memory of 3E, It was on the go well before digital terrestrial, but looking back I had a mix of Terrestrial, Sky/ FTA Astra and MMDS for the first decade of the noughties. The digital revolution starts to blur in my head as age takes its toll.

4 uhf transmitters per mast was the allocation, but 2 uhf transmitters were all that was needed for our current DTV mux. In fact it's probably possible that today's high power UHF broadcast hardware can broadcast spread spectrum, with a single physical uhf transmitter being capable of simultaneously broadcasting mutiple mux on their individual frequencies subject to power constraints. The individual mux itself on an 8mhz slice of the UHF spectrum, say for example ch 33, is composed of multiple narrow band digital streams over the 8mhz band, all individually resolved and recombined in the Dtv receive. I've never even thought before now about the possibility that mutiple spaced out 8mhz transmissions could in turn be generated from the one piece of Uhf hardware, so adding another mux would just be a matter of configuration, and upping the effective radiated power. I wonder is this the case nowadays?

It's extremely important that broadcast TV survives, if only as a protection for truth. As the Donnybrook fiasco showed, we're paying for it , on the double now by Licence and subsidy, so let's give the other channels a bite of that tax, stop hoarding the bandwidth, give a quality incentive to people to remain connected by broadcast. Watching live TV by players and streams is a queasy experience, you're connected, but not really, you're being watched, measured, spoonfed, and are probably several seconds behind reality.

Who else watches the VM HD play stream for the quality, but skips back to the sd broadcast during a break to rejoin reality? I've noticed in the UK forums that there's a distaste for the new Freely TV epg, which is really a new TV OS, as users are unaware as to what they're watching, live broadcast or data stream over the Internet. They're just not comfortable with it.

Digital was assigned 6 channels per transmitter, the 1,5,9 rule doesn't apply on digital so there was more capacity available.

If I recall correctly, RTÉ were originally assigned one multiplex and the rest were to be assigned to the commercial sector for an ITV Digital-style pay TV service. When all of the bidders pulled out during the post-2008 crash, and with the ASO deadline looming, RTÉ were given two to get Saorview off the ground. So the current setup is still based on that.

Ch6/3E/VM2 has had a chequered history alright. Its even referred to a a pirate tv statio in some googke searches, but I stand corrected, it was analogue but not broadcast, only cable and later on Sky. It required an irish broadcast license approval to go on to Saorview, but It was in fact an early test digital channel during the latter analogue years, possibly the early MP2 tests. That was probably where I came across it originally, while fiddling with the UK digital terrestrial tuner in my otherwise analogue TV.