All posts by Mike Dimmick
Below are all of Mike Dimmick's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
Rob: I can't see any announcement of that on the BBC website, and I'd be very surprised.
What I can see is a story that the government are considering reclassifying the offences for non-payment from a criminal to a civil matter: BBC News - TV licence fee non-payment 'could be decriminalised'
At present the licence fee is basically treated as a tax. Non-payment is met with a fine of up to £1000 (that fine goes to the government, not the BBC), at the magistrates' discretion. If you can't pay in one go, they have the power to subtract the fine from your pay, if you tell them how much you earn. Persistent non-payment of the fines can land you in jail if you don't work out a payment plan. Some people take the jail time on point of principle, but in fact there are many, many chances to avoid that.
Changing it to a civil offence would mean that the BBC would have to apply for court orders and bailiffs for non-payment. If a non-payer is truly unable to pay, they would need to use some form of insolvency arrangement - bankruptcy, Debt Relief Order, Individual Voluntary Arrangement - meaning the BBC would only get a portion of the money owed, if anything at all. This is likely to increase the costs of collecting the licence fee, effectively reducing the money available to produce and distribute programmes. It would still be a stick for the BBC's opponents to beat them with ('BBC forces x people a year into bankruptcy', 'BBC bailiffs seize property from x people', etc.).
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Aerialman: Briantist has recently reduced the number of comments per page. Use the 'First comments' and 'Earlier comments' links above the list of comments to go back to the previous pages, or click the page number tabs at the bottom of the list of comments.
Briantist: What's your source for the cost of local TV news? Are you seriously saying that this is nearly 50% of BBC One's entire budget, and costs nearly twice the running cost of BBC Two?
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Council tax is *not* backed by criminal sanction. This is actually a major flaw - councils largely cannot recover all the money owed by non-payers - and should, in my opinion, be corrected.
See Council Tax arrears - GOV.UK for the legal position. Yes, you can still be sent to prison for persistent non-payment but it still doesn't actually give you a criminal record.
It would be instructive to see what the evasion rate is for council tax, and how that compares to the TV licence. That would indicate how much the change to being a civil offence would cost.
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KMJ,Derby: There is unlikely to be a more efficient system than DVB-T2 any time in the next ten years. I previously calculated that the Shannon limit - the theoretical maximum achievable using a single transmit and receive aerial - for the channel conditions for the PSB3, COM7 and COM8 multiplexes is 47.27 Mbit/s. That compares to 40.21 Mbit/s that has already been achieved. The turbo codes used in DVB-T2 are said to get within 0.04 dB of the Shannon limit, though that is with codes 10 million bits long, rather than the 64,800 bits used in DVB-T2.
Any further improvements are likely to require multiple aerial techniques, which is difficult as viewers aren't going to want to install more than one receive aerial.
Encryption is perfectly possible on DVB-T and DVB-T2 as they stand. Freeview boxes have generally included a CAM slot (CI specification) and it was a European requirement for integrated digital TVs to include one. Top Up TV provided a CAM for viewing ESPN, and would have done so for Sky Sports had Sky not prevented it. They complained that the CI specification only encrypts from the transmission to the CAM - the CAM returns data to the box unencrypted, so it theoretically could be plugged into a computer and content ripped from there. The newer CI+ specification, which I believe newer TVs support, protects the communication between the box and the CAM.
However, YouView boxes do not have a CAM slot. This was a deliberate design decision. My Humax DTR-T1010 has a recess in the moulding where a CAM could go, but there's nothing behind it as far as I know.
The problem, as always, is that distributing and managing CAMs and smartcards, activating and deactivating cards when subscribers join or leave (or don't pay), costs money: far more than the actually very low cost of managing the licence fee.
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Aerialman: If that happens, the Sutton Coldfield COM muxes will also move. It won't just be a retune of transmitters that currently use the 700 MHz band, it will be a complete retune of all transmitters to make room. If we even retain six multiplexes (and you can bet that ITV [SDN] and Arqiva will not roll over on that), the COM multiplexes may well have to become national single-frequency networks, and if that happens it will be necessary to change them to DVB-T2 so that the longest guard interval available can be used. There's a good chance that some relays will have to be shut down as no, or not enough, frequencies will be available for them.
The only document I'm aware of that made any gestures towards what might happen is an Arqiva planning study at http://stakeholders.ofcom….pdf . Briantist is, as usual, being massively premature in indicating any particular frequency allocations on this site.
Any new frequency plan is likely to have to be co-ordinated with our European neighbours - we're unlikely to be able to make it fit into our current envelope. If this goes ahead, though, it's likely they will all have to re-plan as well.
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Gerry L: The latest information available on Ofcom's website confirms that the frequencies are as listed here.
If you don't have HD equipment, you should tune in UHF channel 28 for the BBC's SD channels, UHF 25 for ITV1, C4 and C5. The COM multiplexes are on 21, 24 and 27 respectively.
If you do have HD equipment, BBC One, Two, Three and ITV1 and 4hd are on UHF 22. BBC Four, BBC News, C4+1HD, 4Seven HD, Community Channel HD and Al Jazeera's channels are on UHF 32.
The local services are not on air. Ofcom have not yet even issued an Invitation To Apply for the Cheltenham or Hereford service areas.
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Karen: Check whether there is another copy of the services elsewhere in the guide - typically at channel 800 and up. If there are, you live in a service overlap area. If they're more reliable than those at 1, 2, 3 etc, it's probable that your box uses the naïve tuning algorithm: it simply stores the first version it encounters, rather than the best version. If you want to put the best versions at the proper channel numbers, you're likely to have to do a manual retune. Check your box's manual to see how to do this. You can find a collection of manuals and retune advice at
Digital UK - Retuning Instructions .
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Corin: The relevant UK Acts of Parliament - the Broadcasting Acts of 1990 and 1996, and the Communications Act of 2003 - were extended to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man through Orders-in-Council. The orders did in some cases modify the text compared to the UK versions (over and above the simple changes to replace 'United Kingdom' with the corresponding Dependency's name).
This gives the BBC power to enforce TV licensing in the dependencies, and gives Ofcom the power to licence TV multiplex services and broadcasting services, under the same system as the UK.
Scotland, if it becomes independent, will be a completely separate nation with no legal recourse to or by the Westminster parliament, or to the UK Privy Council. It will initially inherit UK legislation for, although Scotland has a separate legal system of courts and procedure, the laws themselves rarely make specific provisions for Scotland.
The exceptions are typically where a different official has power in Scotland compared to England and Wales or Northern Ireland, or a different term is used in Scots law. For example, Communications Act 2003 section 366 ("Powers to enforce TV licensing") begins "If a justice of the peace, a sheriff in Scotland or a lay magistrate in Northern Ireland is satisfied by information on oath [...]". Subsection 11 then says "In the application of this section to Scotland, the reference in subsection (1) to information on oath shall have effect as a reference to evidence on oath."
The licences issued by Ofcom to the Channel 3 companies, Channel 4, Channel 5, the local broadcasters and the multiplex operators all state that the licence is governed by English law. This includes the Scottish Channel 3 licences and the Glasgow local TV licence held by STV. I'd expect the Edinburgh licence to say the same, when it gets published.
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Tuesday 4 March 2014 3:58PM
Paul: Sorry, I think the answer is 'never'. The only Welsh sites listed in Arqiva's Reference Offer were Wenvoe and Moel-Y-Parc. Aberdare is only predicted to cover around 24,000 homes, so I'm afraid you're not a priority for Arqiva (BBC Four HD is carried on a commercial multiplex).
Digital UK's Coverage Checker suggests that you might be able to get a service from Mendip when it launches later in 2014 (possibly August, going by Arqiva's reference offer, could even be earlier), but I expect you'd need a separate aerial since it is 20 degrees east of Aberdare, and uses horizontal rather than vertical polarization.