NTL should switch to a digital only service!

[weetomuncher]

I honestly feel that it is about time that NTL switched to a purely digital TV service.

I know that several areas don't have access to a digital service at the current time but I feel NTL need to provide a service in the same league as Sky and the only way it could provide that is by freeing up the capacity wasted on the analogue service.

I had analogue cable several years ago before the switchover and I couldn't put up with a service like that today.

I think NTL should switch analogue only customers to a telephone only service to free up the capacity to provide a far better range of channels and services for the majority of customers.

Several years ago, when digital television was in its infancy, it was mooted that cable tv would be able to carry 300+ channels compared to 200 or so on satellite which clearly hasn't happened due to their insistance on retaining an outdated and completely inferior system for a minority of customers rather than offering a high quality service to far more customers.

The viewers lost from areas without digital would be likely to be made up from viewers who didn't want to subscribe to NTL due to their current services limitations.

Weeto

hi Weeto to Cable Forum.

purely my personal opinion, but I am quite happy to stay with my analogue tv. I don't get any of the problems I see people with digital reporting on here

lock-ups
pixellation
epg problems
sound dropping out

etc

I'm happy with the channels I get on the family pack & am not fussed about interactive.

I hear what you are saying about the bandwidth, but until the problems with digital stated above, are ironed out, it will take one hell of an incentive for me to change.

As I say, I'm not saying you are wrong, just that I am happy with the status quo.

[mrjed]

do the government want to phase out analouge by like 2010? i remember hearing that somewhere, maybe i just dreamt it, lol

[Tristan]

That's analogue terrestrial, which is a different beast to NTL analogue.

Around 30-40% of NTL's TV customers are currently on analogue... that's far too many to switch them all off in one go. I agree though that they should offer incentives for them to change, because the sooner it's all digital, the better.

(Although likely as not, by the time that happens they'll introduce a super-duper hi-def "digital 2" to use up the space instead...)

Originally Posted by mrjed

do the government want to phase out analouge by like 2010? i remember hearing that somewhere, maybe i just dreamt it, lol

afaik that is the plan - but bearing in mind there is just over 5 years to go, no-one seems to be actually doing anything to enable it.

there are lots of places that can not recieve digital due to location or infrastructure, for example, what will happen to them? Who is going to pay to enable the implimentation of this 'plan' by the deadline, for those people - who are often in remote locations where it will be expensive?

[Pob!]

I do not agree that analogue should be switched off, as digital is inferior in many ways compared with good analogue reception. The main problem is the compression used - all the channels on digital are heavily compressed, much like jpeg photo's, DivX or Xvid video, and quality is lost. Many users report NTL digital is much worse than freeview. The BBC reception pages, and a recent Which? report, both come to the conclusion that a digital TV picture is no better than analogue in most cases, and worse in some.
I guess this could be seen as a good reason to turn off analogue, but the bandwidth freed-up would be used for more channels, not better quality.
Sky are addressing the problem of low quality by starting trials of high-def sattelite broadcasts in 2005 - but guess what? The bandwidth used is much higher than the existing broadcasts.
I think at present people are being suckered into the digital TV realm - the Government does not want to turn off analogue to increase the quality for viewers, they are doing it so they can sell the freed-up bandwidth to mobile phone companies, to get another windfall like the G3 licences.
Pob!

[Womble]

Originally Posted by Pob!

I do not agree that analogue should be switched off, as digital is inferior in many ways compared with good analogue reception. The main problem is the compression used - all the channels on digital are heavily compressed, much like jpeg photo's, DivX or Xvid video, and quality is lost. Many users report NTL digital is much worse than freeview. The BBC reception pages, and a recent Which? report, both come to the conclusion that a digital TV picture is no better than analogue in most cases, and worse in some.
I guess this could be seen as a good reason to turn off analogue, but the bandwidth freed-up would be used for more channels, not better quality.
Sky are addressing the problem of low quality by starting trials of high-def sattelite broadcasts in 2005 - but guess what? The bandwidth used is much higher than the existing broadcasts.
I think at present people are being suckered into the digital TV realm - the Government does not want to turn off analogue to increase the quality for viewers, they are doing it so they can sell the freed-up bandwidth to mobile phone companies, to get another windfall like the G3 licences.
Pob!

I have to agree with Pob, if you compare a decent analogue picture along side a digital one the Ano one is far better. If you get the oppertunity, next time there is a football match on the Beeb compare both. You will see a big differance! The background of the digital picture does not change, they do that to conserve bandwidth. You will also notice the players faces aren't clear on digital, where as on Analogue you can ID the player quite easy, even from a distance.
Having said that, the Kent area have stopped the Analogue service, and the noise (interferance) has all but gone, so most of the problems that plague digital have also gone.

[Derek]

[QUOTE=Pob!]Many users report NTL digital is much worse than freeview./QUOTE]

Ntl take the feed for the BBC channels from the local transmitter so there shouldn't be any difference. I can certainly say I've not had any customer complain about freeview being a better picture and to my eye pretty much all of the digital services have similar pictures for the freeview channels.

[spiderplant]

Originally Posted by dezzo

Ntl take the feed for the BBC channels from the local transmitter so there shouldn't be any difference.

Although ntl do rebroadcast Freeview signals, the quality of the decoder also plays a role. I've done side-by-side comparisons of ntl and freeview decoders showing the same content, and the quality of the ntl picture is better.

[dd2k]

i agree that on some channels the picture quality can be poor compared to the analouge broadcast, but i dont think we should keep analouge as a result of it.

If the analouge system was removed, rather just replacing the bandwidth with more sopping channels they should focus on the compression issues. if for example out of 10, a digital channel takes up 1 and an an anlouge channel takes up 4(cant remember the exact ratio), decrease the compression so that a digital channel uses 2, allowing better quality but still get the amount of channels

DD2K

[Tristan]

Originally Posted by Womble

I have to agree with Pob, if you compare a decent analogue picture along side a digital one the Ano one is far better. If you get the oppertunity, next time there is a football match on the Beeb compare both. You will see a big differance! The background of the digital picture does not change, they do that to conserve bandwidth. You will also notice the players faces aren't clear on digital, where as on Analogue you can ID the player quite easy, even from a distance.
Having said that, the Kent area have stopped the Analogue service, and the noise (interferance) has all but gone, so most of the problems that plague digital have also gone.

That's a little unfair, given that football is probably the thing that digital TV is worst at. It's not a matter of conserving bandwidth, it's just how digital TV (well, MPEG compression) works. That's why the Sky Sports channels have a higher bandwidth than anything else (apart from, um, BBC1...)

[Tristan]

Originally Posted by dd2k

i agree that on some channels the picture quality can be poor compared to the analouge broadcast, but i dont think we should keep analouge as a result of it.

If the analouge system was removed, rather just replacing the bandwidth with more sopping channels they should focus on the compression issues. if for example out of 10, a digital channel takes up 1 and an an anlouge channel takes up 4(cant remember the exact ratio), decrease the compression so that a digital channel uses 2, allowing better quality but still get the amount of channels

DD2K

One analogue channel takes up as much bandwidth (8MHz) as a digital multiplex. The number of digital channels on this multiplex can vary according to the quality you want to get out of the resulting channels. For example, Sky Sports or the movie channels are pretty high quality, so there aren't many to a mux, whereas it's the opposite case for shopping channels.

Your argument that by reducing the number of analogue channels, NTL could up the quality of the digital ones works in theory, but is rather stumped by the fact that NTL don't encode the channels themselves, apart from a couple of exceptions. The feeds are all taken from DSat or DTT. So it doesn't matter how much space NTL give E4, it will always look crap because it's broadcast on satellite at a low bitrate.

On thing that very definitely could be improved if there was more bandwidth though would be the EPG. NTL could devote an entire mux to the broadcasting of EPG data, like Sky do, and we'd be back to 7 days...

(Of course, NTL could also use a digiguide style EPG using the interactive return path, which would be limited only be the amount of future info the TV companies release. I have no idea why they don't do this, other than the fact it would leave Videotron people high and dry.)

[dd2k]

ahh i see what you mean, so effectivly we have to wait for Dsat to improve before ntl can.

yeah i agree, they should dedicate more room to the EPG

[Pob!]

<Quote: One analogue channel takes up as much bandwidth (8MHz) as a digital <multiplex. The number of digital channels on this multiplex can vary according to the <quality you want to get out of the resulting channels. For example, Sky Sports or <the movie channels are pretty high quality, so there aren't many to a mux, whereas <it's the opposite case for shopping channels.

And the new high-def broadcasts being trialled by Sky use 15Mhz of bandwidth, or twice that of existing analogue broadcasts for each channel! NTL will have to compete with Sky on High-Def so bang goes any ideas for using the freed-up bandwidth from switching off analogue...
If you try downloading any HDTV TV shows from the states, even though compressed using XviD and the resolution dropped to work on standard TV's, the quality is outstanding - better than DVD - and this is for TV recorded by home users onto their DVR's.
P.S. I got the idea of NTL digital being worse than freeview from posts to ntl.discussion.cable-tv.digital newsgroup and ntlhell.co.uk
Pob!

[Tristan]

You can't directly compare the (analogue) bandwidth of a digital multiplex across different platforms. For example, DSat and DTT have a lot of error-checking which is not needed on cable. Likewise, DSat used QPSK, and DTT 16QAM for some muxes, whereas DCab uses 64QAM all round -- there is even the possibility of moving to 256QAM in future (this is already used for broadband in some areas).

Basically, cable can get the highest "bitrate per MHz", then terrestrial, then satellite.

For all that though, 15MHz for one channel does seem a hell of a lot...