[Escapee]

Originally Posted by MovedGoalPosts

The government switching off analogue and ntl doing the same, are independent of each other, except for the five pass through cahnels BBC1, 2 ITV, CH4 &5). As you need an analogue STB to decode / unscramble the ntl signal, cable and terrestrial aerial transmission formats can be changed without reference to each other.

Sky a few years ago made the decision to drop analogue, hence they now have the capacity for all the digi channels (most of which are in any case a load of rubbish IMO). However they will have lost a proportion of customers who did not want to incur the costs of upgrade. For ntl the upgrade cost would be higher, as all the STB are provided by ntl, not as with SKy owned. As ever it's going to come down to economics.

If I'm correct, some ntl areas, can't get reliable digi TV yet? If so, I expect that's where ntls TV priorities are likely to lie, along with getting everyone onto the same single platform (bromley, Lnagley, CR3), to ease the future maintenance and then upgrade paths.

Yes there is plenty of capacity if they turn off the analogues, but they will have to spend "money" to fill these with extra services. Apart from the equipment at the Digital headends it will also involve lots of cash being spent for the Media I/O's, ATM equipment and all the RF stuff at the regional headends. (Proppinup could confirm) I would guess that ntl are happy with things the way they are at the moment, as spending all that cash (If they pay the suppliers) will not gain them much extra revenue.