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Originally Posted by RichardCoulter
From what I remember it was Ed Vaizey, when he was a minister, who put the idea forward that SD for the PSB channels should be switched off to cut costs and to create space to help with the loss of the temporary muxes.
Not heard anything about this though after he was no longer in post.
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It was, but it doesn't really matter. A throwaway comment made by a minister can easily be taken out of context by a forum member and used to support their view of how things should happen. A mandatory switch to DVB-T2 would require funding from the Government, he didn't reveal any plans to do that. As things stand, the Government are quite happy to avoid funding a mandatory conversion and to leave the decision to the broadcasters. The Government would probably prefer to auction off the entire UHF broadcasting spectrum to mobile operators at the earliest opportunity. The uncertain long term viability of the platform will hold back funding from the Government and from commercial operators.
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I do hope that it does happen as they may not be enough space for channels like Talking Pictures, Keep It Country etc to continue on Freeview. Without exposure on Freeview, I fear that some channels like Talking Pictures may not be commercially viable and may end up closing on VM & satellite too (incidentally I was talking to someone from Talking Pictures earlier and they were very pleasent to deal with).
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Arqiva don't feel that the time is right to convert the commercial DTT multiplexes to DVB-T2 and there's little chance of it happening until they are ready. They will keep the temporary multiplexes running for as long as they are allowed. Unfortunately, when the temporary multiplexes close and these low budget channels are faced with the cost of financing carriage on a national multiplex, I fear we may well see a few departures from DTT.
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Maybe the local inserts into the sustaining HD feed won't come from TS ID 104, but be sourced from TS ID 44 as regular daily pop up channels at 18:30, 22:30 and derived from the internet in the same way as the BBC Red Button services for events like Wimbledon etc.
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The local SD channels are already there on TS ID 101 for the BBC. I can't see VM setting up 16 additional SD streams for a few minutes each day on a national transport stream. In any event, switching would be clunky and horrible, switching between screen resolutions and between streams which are out of sync with each other by several seconds.
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Do you think that could be possible? It could switch 108 from HD to raw SD from 18:30 to 19:00 so that no upscaling would be involved??
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With a lot of coding and a vast amount of wasted bandwidth if they were to follow your idea. There would still be fairly large areas switched to the wrong local channel. Where a regional network carries overlapping BBC regions there is no easy way of knowing which is the correct region for an individual viewer.
Just let the viewer select the appropriate channel. The BBC put the annoying red slate up for a reason, to prompt the viewer to change channel.