Quote:
Originally Posted by RWCable
I'm confused... how are they planning to reach more households (as stated in tweet) by cutting off all the viewers without Freeview HD/smart TVs? Even TVs sold just 4 years ago don't have Freeview HD capability and set-top boxes with Freeview HD are quite expensive... I imagine Freeview SD-only equipment still makes up a large portion of the total UK audience, no?
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Well the 3 PSB multiplexes have approx 98% population coverage as opposed to 90% on the multiplex it is currently on as the PSB multiplexes are available on Relay transmitters.
My theory is that the cost of staying on their current multiplex is too high so they are cutting costs. Because PSB3 requires HD equipment even for SD streams it is cheaper despite having larger coverage.
The temporary HD multiplexes, COM7 and COM8, which only have approx 30% population coverage, are likely to close in the next few years due to 5G being given spectrum so channels on them are trying to get onto more permanent multiplexes before this happens, so this will be raising the cost as demand increases, which probably is too much for TBN UK.
---------- Post added at 22:45 ---------- Previous post was at 22:42 ----------
And for the last few years the only Freeview tuners in TVs and DTT boxes have been HD. They stopped allowing Freeview branding to be used on any non-HD boxes to encourage this.