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Home Cinema Choice: Freeview digital recorders were the hot ticket item for Christmas 2008, according  to new sales data released by the UK’s digital terrestrial TV service. According to Freeview,  two Freeview+ boxes were bought every minute in the run-up to Xmas, bringing the total number of Freeview+ boxes sold in the UK to more than 900,000.

Freeview managing director Ilse Howling isn’t surprised at the surge of interest, saying: ‘Freeview+ offers outstanding value. It gives the same experience as ‘+’ a recorder from other providers, the only difference is it’s free from subscription.

During a downturn, TV viewing naturally increases as people choose to stay in and watch TV as a form of free entertainment. Freeview is now received in 17.2 million homes. CNN International recently joined the platform (channel 84) and Discovery Networks UK will launch this spring. The first Freeview HD channels will begin transmission at the end of this year.

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Webuser: Sixty-eight per cent of all UK television sets are now digitally linked via cable, satellite or digital terrestrial services.

Industry watchdog Ofcom said in a recent study that householders are continuing to focus on converting their secondary television sets to digital.

Ofcom’s Digital Progress Report for the first quarter of 2008 shows that the total number of digitally linked sets has grown from 33.5 million to 40.5 million in the past twelve months.

There are over 9.6 million homes with Freeview services on their main television set. Sky grew its UK subscriber base to 8.3 million households. The total number of Virgin Media subscribers is now over 3.5 million.

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The Inquirer: OFCOM has published its plans to revamp the UK’s digital terrestrial television system to enable HDTV services on digital terrestrial system, Freeview.Operators will be required to adopt 64-QAM encoding, which enables more channels to be broadcast per multiplex.

Currently, only a couple of the six available multiplexes use this mode, with the other four multiplexes using the more robust but lower capacity 16-QAM encoding, introduced in the early days of DTT broadcasting when low power for digital was necessary to avoid co-channel interference with analogue transmissions.

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HDTV News: The Digital Television Group, a consortium of key broadcasters and manufacturers, is concerned about Ofcom’s plans for high definition TV on the Freeview platform.When the analogue signal switch-off is completed in 2012, Ofcom plans to auction the spectrum for other uses, with HDTV confined to the existing Freeview bandwidth.

HDTV would use MPEG4 compression technology and the DVB-T2 broadcasting standard which is still under development. This would mean that consumers would need to purchase new receiver equipment.

The Digital Television Group believes that this plan is likely to fail and could undermine the future of terrestrial TV.

The group is concerned that the plan places too much faith in the DVB-T2 standard, which has yet to be proved. It wants the spectrum to be available for HD transmissions from at least the five main terrestrial channels.

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BBC News: The BBC will officially launch its high definition television channel on cable and satellite this Saturday.It means viewers will be able to see shows like Strictly Come Dancing and Cranford in high definition, which offers improved sound and pictures.

The BBC also announced that the Queen’s Christmas message would be broadcast in HD for the first time this year.

But Freeview audiences will have to wait, as there is currently not enough space for an HD channel on the service.

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Absolute Gadget: The great thing about Freeview is that once you’ve paid your telly licence, there are a lot of channels that you don’t need to pay extra to get. But the trouble is that the selection is limited compared to offerings from Sky or Virgin. But that could all change as Ofcom has new proposals that could increase the number of channels available on digital terrestrial television and perhaps even herald that proper start of high-defition television without a satellite or cable in sight.According to the proposals, an HD service could start as early as 2009, but would require viewers to ditch their current set-top boxes for ones that could decode the new signals.

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Telegraph: TV viewers will be able to watch the London Olympics in high definition as plans to supply the nation with the new format – free of charge – by 2012 gather pace.

Fresh proposals will see HDTV, which offers sharper images and richer colour, made available to every household via Freeview.

The proposed upgrade was announced on Wednesday by media watchdog Ofcom.

It would begin in the Granada region as early as 2009 and then be rolled out across the UK by 2012 – in time for the Olympic Games in London.

Nearly 13 million homes already have Freeview, a digital terrestrial TV service available through an aerial and without subscription.

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Absolute Gadget: You don’t get anything for free these days, not even Freeview television. But BT is looking to cut the cost of getting on the scene because the BT Vision service is now available to self-install, cutting out the middle man.

For just €43 customers will be able to join in the delights of on-demand and free-to-view television by installing it themselves, rather than paying the usual €86 installation fee.

The Self Install option includes a pair of Comtrend Powerline Adaptors, which plug into wall power sockets and carry the video signal from the BT Home Hub to the V-box across the domestic power circuit.

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ElectronicsWeekly: The UK’s four major broadcasters have called for HDTV to be run on the terrestrial TV ahead of the region’s analogue switch off in 2012.

Trials of HDTV on terrestrial by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five have just finished in London, and nearly all (86%) of trialists expected to see HD services within three years, well before analogue switch-off. Nine out of ten believed that the four broadcasters should be at the forefront of HD developments.

“It’s clear even from this small trial that audiences increasingly expect us and the other major broadcasters to offer high quality HD programming on Freeview in the future,” said Seetha Kumar, head of HDTV at the BBC.

The problem is that HDTV takes four to five times the bandwidth of existing standard definition digital TV. The BBC has demonstrated terrestrial HD at 10Mbit/s with MPEG4, and the trial used standard MPEG4 HDTV boxes from Humax and ADB with digital terrestrial TV (DTT) front ends.

The Digital TV Group (DTG) is investigating the use of a polarising approach that could be used to deliver HD services alongside existing broadcasts. This is one of the options or the second generation of the DTT specification by the international DVB standards group, but would require a new radio receiver chip. This is not likely until 2009 at the earliest.

“Technically, the trial has more than fulfilled our expectations. All major technical hurdles are behind us,” said Simon Fell, director of technology at ITV Consumer.

However, the likelihood of HD services before switch-off is low. “We have previously said that the spectrum allocation [after analogue switch-off] will be market led so if there is a demand for HD then that will be what it is used for,” said a Government spokeswoman.

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AV Zombie: The number of digital TV homes in Europe and the US will top 187 million by 2010 according to a report by market research firm Datamonitor.

Europe leads the conversion from analogue with 65 million European homes expected to be able to receive digital TV by the end of this year.

The UK is the most developed digital TV nation with more than 50 percent penetration. Datamonitor suggests that by 2010 this will have risen to 95 percent, with Freeview replacing Sky as the dominant digital TV source as early as 2008.

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