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Digital Switchover Put Back To 2012

TVs to have "sell by date" label (July 2004)

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NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
Media Guardian:

Quote:
Culture secretary Tessa Jowell confirmed today that the analogue TV signal would not be switched off before 2012, two years later than previously promised by the government.
But she said the process of switching off BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel Five's analogue services could start in some regions as soon as 2007.

Help is also expected to be on tap for the "most vulnerable" including poor and elderly people who are unlikely to buy digital upgrades.

And in a bid to persuade viewers to upgrade their TV sets an initiative will be launched to ensure all new sets have a "sell by" date label to warn consumers the TVs will have a limited lifespan.


Details at http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1267049,00.html
FL
Flava
I've said turning off FM and AM radio in 10 years is stupid and isn't going to happen because of the amount of radios and whole stereo systems it will make redundant...

Bur turning off analogue TV in 10 years does seem more realistic, indeed analogue satellite services were "switched off" here within 3 years of digital launching.
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
Flava posted:
Bur turning off analogue TV in 10 years does seem more realistic, indeed analogue satellite services were "switched off" here within 3 years of digital launching.


You've missed the point and drawn a false comparision.

And in addition to that, let me quote from a post from Digital Spy which sums up perfectly why you can't compare Sky analogue and terrestrial analogue:

http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=140563&page=2&pp=25 posted:
Post number 38:
Sky Analogue had a subscriber base of 3 million people, all of which had a universally available upgrade path - changing to Sky Digital which was at least no worse than that they got from their analogue setup. ... Sky had serious commercial reasons to want to get rid of analogue as quickly as possible - couldn't lock viewing cards to boxes, VideoCrypt encryption system had been compromised, no copy protection available on PPV channels.

... various incentives available to analogue subscribers meant that they did change ... very quickly Sky were able to put an analogue closure plan in place which centred around making analogue lesser and lesser value for money whilst digital looked more and more attractive.


Now while Digital TV as a whole looks more attractive, it's also described as being "instead of having 5 channels of crap, we'll have 300 channels of crap" and "I might have 300 channels but there's still nothing on I want to watch".

And in the real world example in the original post, we're discussing about 25m homes if not more. Assuming that it took Sky three years to shift 3m, on the same logic you're looking at 25yrs on the same scale. Now 2010 was a silly target anyway, 2012 is no more probably IMO.

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