All posts by Trevor Harris
Below are all of Trevor Harris's postings, with the most recent are at the bottom of the page.
It has all gone very quiet about the so called "Digital Switchover". Practically every mobile phone has an FM tuner and none have a DAB tuner. This means the sale of FM radio is much bigger than DAB.
It seems clear now that the internet is becoming the medium of choice. The advantage to the BBC is that internet broadcasting is relatively cheap.
Continued investmemt in DAB is probably the worst example of BBC waisting money.
As I understand a number of FM transmitters and getting to end of life and will need replacement. The BBC hoped they would be able to turn off the main transmitters for thier national stations. With FM listening still increasing the BBC is going to have to replace those transmitters.
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Comparing Sky to Freesat is like comparing an Aston Martin to a Ford Escort. They are very distinctive products. Its only on Sky that I can see all the F1 races, the Ashes and live premiership football.
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Brianist. Actually Sky have just published their results today and now they have 10.4 million subscribers. Even if everyone did desert Sky there are plenty of other paytv companies who would want to take them up.
It does not follow that if if there was no pay tv market that the FA would go free to air. The FA would first of all would be concerned that free to air games would impact on gate reciepts. When Sky Sports started they Sky had a very hard job to persuade the FA to agree to live broadcasts. Secondly the loss of income would have a large impact on the sport. Many clubs would go bankrupt and the rest will not be able to afford the best players reducing the quality of the league.
It is not only sports who would be affected. At the moment Sky has 70 HD channels many of which would not be available at all. Sky also has a 3D channel.
There is no distinction between the BBC and Sky in terms of paytv. Both are subscription services the difference being one is compulsory.
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Les Nicol: I agree competition is a good thing. BT's offer Sports offer has certainly shaken the broadband market. I have just gone over to Sky Fibre for £10 per month for a year.
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Actually I was aware of this meeting.
Firstly lets take Ed Vaizey. He is a Government Minister and so he has probably been missinformed of progress. What Minister is going to admit his plan has failed. He offered no significant evidence.
As for BBC Directors we all know that they have not got a clue to what is going on inside the BBC as has been shown from recent events.
The installation of Dab radios in new cars does not help the millions of cars which don't have DAB.
The plan has a fatal flaw in thinking they can turn off national FM with 50% of the population still listening to it. They are not even on track for the 50%.
Although DAB has well documented fatal flaws another issue has become more significant. The DAB system cannot support any further expansion due to spectrum issues. They had to reduce bit rates to unacceptable limits to support the small number of stations now available. Even the current plan has to continue to use FM for local stations.
It seems that many people believe that Ed Vaizey will delay the decision for 2 years bringing us nicely to the election and the probability that another Government will have to sort out the mess.
The Government and the BBC also try to cloud the issue by talking about DAB and "Digital Radio" in the same breath. Of course Digital includes internet broadcasting which is doing rather well. Infact I believe that the Internet will become the medium of choice making DAB redundant.
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@ Brianist
The BBC has only paid £6m from 2012 and it will reduce to £4.4m in 2014. I assume this will only apply to PSB channels BBC1, ITV1, Chennel 4, and Five. This is insignificant compared to executive expenses, £100m spent on refurbishing Broadcasting house and at least £100m waisted on DAB.
There is also the issue of whether we should have any PSB broadcasters consinering the minimal PSB output.
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Actually there is another issue and that is EPG prominance. As I understand it one of the reasons that Sky was permitted to charge the BBC was for thier prominant position in the EPG. Prominant positions in an EPG have commercial value and the EPG charge was meant to be compensation for that.
The Government is loosing site of the main aim of providing privileges to PSB was to provide Public Service Broadcasting and not to provide cheap tv. The amount of PSB programs is now minimal and certainly the quality is pretty poor. It seems that it is moving towards pay tv channels subsidising the PSB channels.
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@brianist
Sorry I miss typed the cost of refurbishing Broadcasting House was £1bn including £200m overspend.
When Sky started ITV refused to go onto Sky inorder to encourage Ondigital. This seem to have no effect on Skys expansion and eventually ITV had to go on Sky. I think the same would happen if the BBC was to leave Sky. People could just get an analogue aerial or use the internet. Of course if the BBC did leave Sky they could annoy 11.4 million subscribers who might demand that they shouldn't have to pay the licence fee.
If the BBC left Sky they would not be able to cover big events like the Olympics. For the London Olympics Sky provided free of charge 24 SD and 24 HD channels. Something the BBC could not have done. If the BBC was to leave Sky Europsport could take over as they have the rights too. As it was it was left to ESPN to provide the live 3D coverage.
It must also be remembered the Freesat is totally dependent on Sky.
To put it simply the BBC needs Sky more than Sky needs the BBC.
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I said that Freesat is totally dependent on Sky. Firsly Freesat is only an EPG it has not satellite bandwidth itself. Secondly most of the channels on Freesat are Sky free to air channels. Thirdly the BBC sends its EPG data for Sky and it is Sky that multiplexes it into the various channels.
Of course Freesat could start it's own satellite service independent of Sky. But that would mean the EPG would not appear on Sky boxes. The BBC would have to duplicate transmissions if it wants to stay on Sky with its 11.4 million subscribers. In fact any channel that wanted to be on Sky and Freesat would have to duplicate transmisions.
The reason for this is that the Freesat EPG is incompatable with Sky's EPG. Sky boxes cannot display Freesat EPG data and Freesat boxes cannot display Sky's EPG.
It is interesting to note that as far as I know it is only the red button HD service which is exclusive to Freesat. Freesats viewing numbers is still low to make exclusive Freesat channels viable.
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Wednesday 17 July 2013 10:29AM
I am hopeing that the BBC will put the HD channels on 101 and 102 on Sky. Sky has this neet system for using lower channel numbers for HD if you have a HD box.
I wonder why they are announcing this now. It might be just to try and improve thier image after all the bad publicity they have had.
I still cannot figure out how they can pay for this. BBC 1 is already 65% repeats shurely they are not going to increase that. I don't think the public will put up with an increase in licence fee after all the revalations of financial mismanagement. They have already announced they are going to dumb down the sports coverage. As we can see the news coverage has certainly deteriated.