UK government report calls for the end of broadcast TV

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

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/...

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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...

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