[RichardCoulter]

Originally Posted by Horizon

A few years ago this was my thinking as well, ie linear tv will end and it will all be VOD. Now that Netflix is here and is doing what VM's VOD service never did, ie giving a decent selection of stuff instantly available for a good price, I can see how most people think linear will die off.

Except, after "feasting" on numerous tv boxsets and films on Netflix in recent times, in my household we have gone back to old fashioned telly viewing habits. Where we don't have to choose what we watch all the time, its done for us. And we have to wait a week for the next episode of whatever show we are currently watching, which makes it more interesting than watching several episodes of the same show all in one sitting.

So, in my house at least, linear isn't quite dead yet.

---------- Post added at 21:37 ---------- Previous post was at 21:26 ----------

As for SD and STBs going by 2020, me thinks not. Perhaps on Sky, it could happen as they were the ones that axed analogue first.

I may be wrong on this, but for cloud based tv services, I think you still need some form of stb, ie for encryption?? And as for SD, there will still be many people that will not have HD tvs by 2020, especially those on Freeview. So I don't see the demise of SD yet. What VM and others may do is launch new channels only in HD and start to remove SD+1 channels in favour of HD+1 channels instead. And using six times more bandwith in the process.

But you don't need an HD TV to watch HD channels. They can be viewed on SD sets, but obviously won't be in HD (but, apparently, the picture will be better because the source is of a better quality).