Freeview Campaign goes for HD gold
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007Olympic logo farce highlights approaching switchover deadline
With the last phase of the digital switchover not due to take place until 2012, it is currently likely that viewers watching the London Olympics from abroad will be able to do so in better quality TV than UK residents.
According to a report in the Telegraph, The HD For All lobby group, was contacted by ITV boss Sir Michael Grade, who intends to take the high-definition issue to the Government and ensure that HD is available on the Freeview platform in time for the Olympic games.
Grade said that the group is determined to “get the Government and the regulator [Ofcom] to understand… the level of consumer anger they are going to face after analogue switchover when the public realise that they will be unable to receive their favourite channels in HD on Freeview on the HD-ready TV sets they are buying in their millions.”
Switching off the analogue signal would allow for more data to be transmitted. Conceivably, the free space could be used to broadcast all the current DTT channels at a higher resolution, therefore making HD the new SD.
Ofcom is due to auction off this signal spectrum, the rub being that commercial pay-TV broadcasters are going to be armed with considerably more financial clout than licence-funded public service broadcasters. Over 2 million UK citizens have forked out for expensive HD Ready TV sets, and with Freeview still being the most popular Digital choice, plenty of people will be upset if it means their HD investments don’t pay off.
In the Telegraph report, Steve Dowdle, the managing director of Sony UK and HD For All member is quoted saying that the Freeview platform will meet with an “inevitable demise” without HD, and that “a two-tier TV society” would be the result of HD not coming to the terrestrial platform.
One thing that pretty much everyone can agree on though, with the possible exception Seb Coe, is that the 2012 Olympics logo is going to look like an unpleasent neon botch job whether viewed in HD or not.
