HD on Freeview - Act Now to protect Broadcasting

[paul-av-tech]

As you may have heard on this site already.

Ofcom are planning on selling off the existing channels used by analogue services when we go 'digital'. The upshot being - whilst the rest of Europe will be watching the Olymics in HD on a free service, we poor Brits will yet again be sold down the river by a money grabbing regime that only wishes short term profits by selling off the bandwidth to telephone companies (again)

Make your voice heard now, comments to Ofcom have to be in by March 20

For more in depth (than the above rant) please link to the following external site:

www.hdforall.org.uk

And sorry if this has been pointed out by other posters in the past.

[Jonstone]

This campaign, or ones similar have been mentioned here before.

It raises a few questions in my mind which maybe some more knowledgeable people could answer.

If all the available bandwidth after analogue switch off were to be made available for HD channels how many could there be?

That site only mentions BBC ITV channel 4 and 5.

If these are the only channels that could benefit wouldn't it put them at an unfair cometitive advantage compared to other channels transmitting over freeview who couldn't get access to bandwidth for an hd channel?

If all we are talking about is a few hd channels wouldn't it be better to allow the full terrestrial spectrum to be used for sd programming to offer a service to the vast majority of people without hd ready sets that is a viable alternative to sd sky or cable?

Wouldn't it be better to restrict hd to a satellite or cable provided service where the potential bandwidth would allow for many more channels. This could be done in a freesat manner, there are sat receivers on the market now that can receive the BBC test channel, there is no reason why a proper hd service couldn't be provided free over satellite and have nothing to do with sky.