When the analog TV signals were turned off in most places around fifteen years ago, their replacement took the form of a set of digital multiplexes. ATSC for North America, and DVB-T for Europe and other places. This would deliver a multi-channel broadcasting solution for the future, and this would be how those not on a cable would consume their telly. It’s a surprise then to find that some governments are already looking at turning off digital TV broadcasting, with the UK in particular wanting to put a date on the switch-off of 2032.
It’s been no secret for many years that linear broadcast TV is being overtaken by streaming services, and this move projected to come at the end of the transmitting contract was always likely to come eventually. Even with increasingly few younger people watching traditional TV though, it still comes as a bit of a shock that it’s happening so soon. The replacement will be an online service for which initially a set-top-box will be required. We’re guessing there will be a storm of protest, but since it’s still quite a few years away and broadband coverage is now near-universal, there’s a good chance it will peter out as the time approaches.
Aside from the end of analog TV, we’ve seen a steady decline in AM and Long Wave transmission across Europe. What makes this surprising then is that instead of being a legacy analogue system, the one facing the turn-off is the future-proof replacement, and one that still sees plenty of use at that. A major shift in consumer electronic technology is taking place, but will anyone notice it?
Header: Carlos Adampol Galindo, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Governments can sell RF spectrum. Of course they’re going to kill off any clients of it they’re not making money from.
You also can’t track people with over the air broadcast, whereas with streaming you can delve right into their brains, and get time and location metadata too.
And that’s seemingly what most people crave… being tracked and watched 24/7.
Smart TVs take screenshots every few seconds to try to identify what content you’re watching.
Lets not forget that they forced everyone to go out and buy new hardware overnight. There was no mandated period where TVs sold had to support both analog and digital transmission. That means when analog went away, people had to buy new equipment to keep watching and people understandably didn’t wanna do that.
Broadcast TV killed itself, because there’s never anything on it.
There’s dozens of channels crammed into a tiny bandwidth, everything looks like crap and glitches out all the time, the standards are outdated, the subtitles usually don’t work, and there’s barely a single show you’d want to watch – and that too is at some inconvenient time or gets canceled because the channel didn’t want to pay for the next season. The rest is either news you’d get from elsewhere, or endless re-runs.
Heck, any time I want to watch TV, I pick up the program guide and go “Oh, there’s XYZ on later this evening. Let me fire up the broadcaster’s streaming service and watch it right now, since I’m sitting here with nothing else to do.”
Indeed.
No bizarre conspiracy theories needed…
Commercial ad-funded broadcasters are basically the old-school equivalent of AI slop on the tubes. It’s the absolute lowest effort, re-running the same season of “Air Crash Investigation” from 2003 and old episodes of “Family Guy” over and over and over… I can turn on the TV today, and see the exact same episodes on daily rotation that I watched 10-15 years ago. The quality of new original programming too has become absolutely abysmal, even worse than it was, because nobody wants to spend any money on production or hire anyone with actual talent. Self-taught amateurs on Youtube make better shows.
The only point of broadcast TV is the publicly funded broadcasting that covers topics that nobody else would – culture that you wouldn’t otherwise find, especially your own local culture instead of Hollywood junk – but because public broadcasting tends to attract politically inclined individuals, that ruins the whole thing. It becomes a preachy partisan propaganda tube that merely pretends to be neutral.
Digital over-the-air tv has vastly better quality than cable in my area. It’s embarrassing. Comcast uses heavy compression. It’s like watching a pirated DIVX movie from the early 2000s. Over the air, I get 1080i with no compression artifacts.
Technologically, broadcast is still a good medium for live sports, news, traffic, and weather. Stuff that many people want to watch simultaneously in real time. But I’m sure even those use cases are dying TVs usually ship without an antenna now.
One OTA/cable digital broadcast mux is around 50 Mbps. It’s basically like your standard cable modem internet connection on the downstream, except instead of streaming one channel at a decent bitrate, you’re streaming ALL the channels each at a barely passable bitrate. The quality depends on how greedy your broadcasting company is.
What happened with OTA here was that the broadcasters increased the number of channels per mux AND reduced the transmitting power to sell more ad slots and save money, so the picture quality went to crap and it started breaking up from the slightest gust of wind on the antenna or even flicking a light switch somewhere in the house. TV became unwatchable unless you had cable.
In Europe the TV is the only remaining government media monopoly and programs are made for the elderly, who still have equipment to receive.
Now the EU is aiming to restrict the free internet only to approved content, and thus the old media monopoly is not needed.
Good point on that restricting thing, but the UK isn’t EU anymore though, but in reality most of the nasty stuff (not all) comes from ‘meetings of euro ministers’ who then agree to do something unpleasant, all outside of the EU system, so with things like you described they can do the nasty stuff Europe-including-Uk-wide, plus some extra countries that have politicians who are ‘managed’ by the same root think-tanks that come up with the grand schemes.
Can you give an example of “restrict the free internet only to approved content”? I’m interested in what this might be.
Three seconds of googling can find you the most seditious, blasphemous, hateful and misanthropic content imaginable yet they say the internet is censored
They have a plan to make everything monitored, and to have every user identified, with an ID and whatnot.
So the censorship flows from that.
And it’s a work in progress.
And if you did not notice an increased lack of freedom already then perhaps you live under a rock. A damp cosy dark space under a big rock.
I live in Belarus and the only censored internet is the one I use VPN for because I can’t legally buy games on Steam (it’s banned for Belarus but ok if you’re in EU). Our own Runet is better than public internet in EU.
Could you be more specific please Aknup? Those are grandiose claims but they could mean literally anything. Who is “They”? Tell us more about these plans.
@Kevin Peters I’m not sure what people are on about, it’s constantly in the general news and tech news, I see it discussed in various countries, the ‘digital ID’ and the ‘age-restrictions-that-coincidentally-mean-we-need-to-have-the-details-of-everybody’ and the ‘chat control’ that is defeated in EU parliament then un-defeated. And a general discussion about ways to get more control of the people and their use of the internet and how that can be achieved. These things are something certain people want and they will go on and on and on trying to push it through.
No doubt there are many hours of discussion in discussion forums with high-paid ‘pundits’ on YT to watch where they try to convince people that’s oh so necessary because ‘think of the kids’ or ‘terrorism’ or ‘organised crime’ or ‘those people that have views we do not want them to have being able to talk’ and ‘it causes cancer because it makes people smoke’ and whatever other nonsense they try to use as a lever.
Financed by various billionaires that they roped in, or are instigators, btw.
Talking of which, whatever happend to Vance? He was critical of the EU and their ever growing restrictiveness and now he seemed to have vanished from the planet and I hear nothing about him anymore. He was ignoring the same things happening in the US BTW, but it’s always easier to look outside than at yourself of course.
i can’t find anything interesting using Google these days. outside of platform pages like Reddit, all it finds me is AI-generated spam pages containing a video i have to watch if i must know how close to the wall a toilet can go, and that video just wants to sell me timeshares. meanwhile my inbox is full of emails telling me my Kroger points are expiring. the noise has crowded out the signal completely
That Google is completely unusable for many years is known fact. It’s no longer search engine. I was for example shocked when mum was for paying ETA when travelled to UK and first page offered wasn’t genuine government one, but some scam website profiting off people which doesn’t know, because it’s not something they do every day. So in search result’s are only ones, which pay to Google and it’s no longer based on what is matching best your search prompt. I am more worried by power tech companies have then government in any reasonably working democratic country.
Self-host degoog for dealing with that problem.
https://github.com/degoog-org/degoog/releases/tag/0.23.0
How about the EU Digital Services Act and the EU Chat Control 1.0 message scanning legislation?
I’ll bite. For example, they restrict access to some news sites. The EU illegally (bypassing their own rules) implemented chat control so the EU police can browse everyone’s private text messages without a judge getting involved. Then there is of course the DSA, that forces online platforms to moderate based on what the EU demands. Let’s say that the EU says that pizza is the most healthy meal, and you disagree, then your speech has to be moderated on any platform operating in the EU. The UK takes the crown with arresting people for speech. It’s even worse than Russia in that regard (if my memory serves me right it’s about 13000 a year in the UK vs a 1000 in Russia). The EU is trying it’s best to go after that record sadly. I’m hearing more and more reports about people here in the Netherlands getting house visits from the police because they signed an online petition to implement an EU law that the EU disagrees with. They aren’t being arrested yet, but those people have clearly been put on watch lists. Germany is trying to ban a political party for being too popular, many EU countries are arresting politicians for fake charges. It’s getting crazy.
And every year they keep voting in folks who are all for this stuff.
Exactly the same stuff that was done by a certain German party in the 1930’s.
It would appear that most Europeans chose not to be free…
Ah yes, conspiracy theories and wild exaggerations. How dare they try to regulate big american corporations!
You know everything that has a license.. yea that is just one company buying their way to being the approved outlet for what is censored for everyone else. All those ID laws? Yea thats censorship as well. When things are restricted except for when you participate in x y and z thats also censorship, just people like you who may participate don’t recognize it as such because you’ve been so well trained to only want to consume what you’re told to.
Please give some examples of restrictions. I live in Czech Republic so EU and i don’t know any. Different matter is chat control, which is not implemented yet and hopefully never will be. UK is much stricter and more nosy like requiring ID’s to watch adult content and requirements about keeping history of visited websites fo ISP’s. I can be wrong, but that’s what i was said when installing network for client there vy BT.
In two sentences you said “Show me an example…..Then discard chat control”.
So which Gov do you work for, because that is next level cope.
I live in a region with extreme weather. Conventional TV and radio are the only communication media that survive. Anyone that thinks the Internet is the answer to everything is wrong.
Linear TV has it’s merits. For one you get introduced to programming you would otherwise miss. Being able to broadcast important messages to a large audience.
Then again, I get introduced to programming I will miss, because I won’t be there when it is shown. I would have to go through the trouble of recording it and watching it later, but why would I do that when I can stream the same program?
I remember when I was a kid, all the interesting sci-fi shows were broadcast in the middle of the night when I wasn’t supposed to be awake, and then they always canceled the show for a lack of viewership after a single season. These days there are no new interesting shows on TV, because they’re first released on streaming media and then years later may end up on broadcast rotation IF they’re cheap enough to license (i.e. not popular).
If we hadn’t had this stage we wouldn’t have had cheap DVB-T USB dongles for SDR. Yay.
We may be looking at an answer to the Fermi paradox. Technological civilisations only spend 100 years or so broadcasting RF. Digital TV and DAB will already look like noise from a distance. Low-power wireless will be invisible.
By 2032 AI will be so good that it will generate entertainment on demand and it will be interactive, a complete paradigm shift.
It would be a shame as this is a mass communication system that will work without larger data infrastructure. It would also mean a loss of privacy as it will be known who is watching what and when from where.
Coming soon to the UK, anyone with an internet connection must have a TV licence
The government might want to do that, but they don’t have to (they can just harvest the IP addresses of people who watch live streaming channels and cross-match them with the relevant ISPs) – and more importantly, as internet access is becoming recognised as a necessity of modern life while TV has always been licensed as a luxury, it would go against almost a century of public policy, not to mention a prevailing assumption that we don’t tax necessities. No government has ever dared to say “anyone who has a TV must have a TV licence” – they’ve even stopped insisting that TV shops furnish them with the addresses of buyers – and I don’t think they’re about to start now.
But it does explain why the UK is in such a hurry to turn off digital broadcasting, which is more or less immune to any kind of detection at all, especially in the days of more or less universal LCD TV adoption – whereas, as I say, detection of live streaming is trivial.
In the UK if you have any equipment capable of receiving TV signals you must have a TV licence. Yes if you have a TV, you must have a licence.
Back in the days of home computers using TV’s as the display, a TV licence was needed even if your only use of a TV was with the computer.
If it’s so easy to check if I’m watching live TV or any BBC content via the internet, why do I get so many letters threatening me with legal action. It may be possible, but it does not appear to be implemented. Much easier to cast the legal net wide and just assume everyone needs a licence. If people are not watching TV, widen the scope of the licence to include what they are doing.
You do not need a TV licence in the UK if your TV is used solely as a computer monitor and never receives live television broadcasts or BBC iPlayer
No you don’t. You only need a TV license if you are watching anything they class as “Live TV” regardless of the source.
Exactly. Or using iPlayer to watch TV on demand, as of a few years ago. I only ever watch DVDs and TV-on-demand from ad-supported sources, so I tell them to go away, and they have so far (for the last two decades) left me alone.
(Bikeforever, sorry that you’ve ended up paying a large amount of money that you didn’t need to – or forgone a useful piece of equipment out of an excess of caution, whichever it’s been.)
Germany used to be similar here, except that households had to pay a fee if a TV or radio was somewhere in there.
Not sure if a second TV did cost extra, it’s been so long!
Anyway, that was a very agressive time,
in which the people of the agency in charge to collect these fees
tried to gain access to the homes and tried to spot hidden TVs.
They basically were very energic and talked in a way that made citizens feel uncomfortable
and acted as if they had the right to make a house search.
The national telco was sorta similar in its fear of unlicensed/imported phones, if memory serves.
Not all employees/officials were that way, of course.
There also were polite ones.
Sometimes that fee also was tied to the inhabitants, I vaguely remember.
If a child became an adult, for example.
The radio listeners without any TV (no equipment with built-in TV tuner) who -had to pay less- had been constantly being annoyed.
They hadn’t been believed that they had no TV at all,
so they were constantly being sent letters to that asked them if they had finally aquired a TV by now.
Which was a totally possible scenario, by the way, if someone didn’t watch TV at home,
but was a movie fan who merely had a video monitor connected to an VHS player (yes, player, not VCR).
Then no TV tuner was involved, at all.
A court then later dismissed the demand that “internet capable” devices such as PCs could have been treated as broadcast receivers, too.
Nowadays a fee is being demanded in general, without the need of citizens to own any receiver. Happy end? 🥲
Yeah, I remember! Same with consoles such as NES, too.
RF connection was very common before TVs had DIN or SCART input over here.
That being said, small monochrome video monitors didn’t cost the world and modding an ZX81 for VBS (baseband video) wasn’t too difficult, either, gratefully. :)
The C64 and other home computers had an optional AV out, too.
I remember that the Amiga 500 had an monochrome video out, too.
Not sure about ZX Spectrum, BBC Master and the other BBC micros, however.
I have to pay 300 € / year in CH, because i could watch TV on my PC or phone. 🤮
Netherlands here, I’m forced to pay it through income tax. I can’t even watch TV.
Lol, never needed [brainwashing] MSM, anyway. With Bit torrents and freely available open source steaming servers, I am my own broadcaster and editor – no trashy MSM stuff for me. I decide what I wanna watch, and that’s that. :/
you do realize your abnormal viewing habits make you more obvious to those monitoring traffic, unless you are actually sneakernetting your media you stick out like a sore thumb, not to mention broadcasting to whoever is attached to your torrents what you are downloading.
thats what a vpn is for. so many people on here saying how easy it is to detect streaming in a world where a vpn exists.
*streaming
Funny how all kinds of monopolies die in about the same (or similar) way. Taxes-paid, privately-paid, the end is the same, descend into irrelevancy (mostly due to its own stupidity), then the final nail.
US still has sizable demographic that watches over-the-air content, things like weather or local news/gossip, or endless reruns of the old soap operas interspersed with the shopping channels. Where this experiment of shutting this down will go is quite a guess, since this has never been done before; but then again, humanity in general had never experimented with the unlimited global information sharing either.
Technicalities-wise it makes sense, and it is darn cheaper overall, just now it really becomes the wildest KGB dream eagerly implemented by the (supposedly) democratic societies on their own volition : ]
I’ve never had cable, or any pay TV service. No WiFi, or high speed internet. Only in the past year or so, did I lose dial-up internet. Currently using my phone’s hotspot feature for home internet. Losing broadcast TV would suck, but I’ll live. Somehow don’t think it will completely end. Way too much invested in equipment.
Aside from the what to watch. I’ve found over the air channels appear and disappear depending upon time of day making it kind of unreliable to base anything around. The latest standard is suppose to fix that, but that’ll be another round of replacement TV boxes bought with a coupon.
Given modern programing, we all just might be better off with no programs, broadcasting or streaming.
South Africa has been trying to switch off the analoge transmissions for years, missing the 2010 deadline, and another later deadline. They have finally managed to turn off analogue transmission to about 40% of the population, excluding the most populous provinces. In its place, we do have a digital broadcast, but I can totally see our country spending millions on setting up digital broadcasting only to kill it 5 years later.
Sigh!
Hi! There’s also satellite TV in Europe DVB-S (DVB-S2, an extension).
Satellite TV started in the 80s and used to be very popular in the 90s and early 2000s as a free alternative to cable TV (it used to be analog but digital broadcast ran in parallel soon).
In fact, some cable head stations used to receive their source material from satellite transponders.
So both terrestrial analog TV and satellite TV were the more direct alternative, with less latency.
The clocks shown in new year’s countdowns on TV were not delayed, if compared to a radio controlled-clock.
A difference maybe can be seen with streaming or DVB-T2,
which undergo some extra processing steps (compressing, multiplexing etc).
The original DVB-T broadcast was very lo-fi and was replaced in ~2016 by incompatible DVB-T2,
which switched codec from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 or HEVC.
I don’t think i’ve ever heard an AM broadcast here in northern EU. Maybe CB radio chats, but even that has been mostly FM for like over 30 years. They were even planning to ban AM CB like 35 years ago, there was a date and all, but it didn’t happen though.
Did anyone ever read the source of the referenced article?
There are no plans to kill linear TV in the UK. There are plans to move terrestrial programme distribution from DVB-T transmitters to internet streaming which is a completely different thing.
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/watch-this-space-a-new-strategic-direction-for-uk-media-green-paper-and-public-consultation
When was the last time you owned a TV that you could put a box on top of?
Sadly, I’m not shocked in the least. The governments that are supposed to view us as citizens instead see us as consumers at best and enemies at worst. They want us dependent on their corporate overlords and under constant mass surveillance.
That’s unfortunately thanks to the nature of capitalism, maybe.
Politicians nowadays emerge from the ruthless business world.
We can be glad that our countries aren’t ruled by big companies/enterprises.
Not directly and entirely, at least. Law and constitution are still above.
Another thing to remember is that “they” were born and raised as same citizens of a country as “us”, grew up in same towns and cities.
Sure, in different spot and woth a different social status, but still among “us”.
They’re a reflection of our society, thus. So if we point at them, we also point at us. In some way..
Because maybe if each of us had a more positive effect on the other, then “their” character wouldn’t have been ruined so much by money and power.
There are still countries which force by law to pay state controlled or “independent” (which is also state controlled) channels. We can only hope these get flagged as obsolete and shut down including those rackets.
As a professional in the Broadcast industry I find the shift completely away from Analog broadcast to be against the original idea of Radio communication. Sure, we can provide data to users with better methods, but what about when those methods are unable to provide? Thankfully AM and FM radio still operate, but for how long?
When we go full streaming for content, either via direct connection or RF delivery, we cut off the freedom to receive that once existed.
And public service is one of the edicts of the FCC act of 1934. But without a specific kind of tuner you can’t receive video broadcasts now, so television is no longer covered.
As both a legacy of our technological heritage, and as a way to communicate without the need for streaming decoders, we should keep at least one channel per market in place with Analog content. And not Low power stations either.
But, let’s continue chasing the almighty dollar, shall we.
I weep for what once was a proud industry that provided content without the need for personal information to support it.