The end of Freeview

[Jaymoss]

Originally Posted by Paul

The article is clearly about Freeview, no one has been watching that for 9 decades.

Yes but that is not what the paragraph says does it

Free aerial TV, the way millions of us have watched for over two decades, is being lined up for retirement in favour of telly delivered over your broadband.

Is that statement correct Paul? No it is not "Freeview Free aerial TV, the way millions of us have watched for over two decades, is being lined up for retirement in favour of telly delivered over your broadband." Now that is correct

Or "Free aerial TV, the way millions of us have watched for over nine decades, is being lined up for retirement in favour of telly delivered over your broadband. "

End of the day when Freeview is switched off then free to air aerial transmissions I assume will end with them so it is not only freeview that they are killing off it is the whole medium which is a lot longer than 2 decades old. Get why I stopped reading now Paul?

I get you're making up silly (even pedantic) excuses.
Whether they agree with it or not, the rest of the posters at least made an effort to read it.

Since you have not, I guess you wont need to comment further in the topic.

[Dingbat]

Perhaps I’m missing something in this debate? Broadcasting in the UK has been purely digital since analogue TV transmission was switched off in 2012, and the only digital broadcast medium to aerial is Freeview.

[joglynne]

This is only a Green Paper and looking into my local transmitter it says that ....
" The Winter Hill transmitter is not scheduled to close. Arqiva recently completed a major structural renewal program at the Bolton site. In fact, the UK government's long-term broadcasting strategy commits to maintaining digital terrestrial television (Freeview) until at least 2034"

[homesecurity]

Having installed and maintained terrestrial aerials and satellite systems across the UK for over 25 years, the idea that terrestrial DTT (Freeview) will simply vanish into an all-IP streaming model in 2034 ignores the physical engineering realities of mass broadcast:

1. Unicast IP Streaming vs Point-to-Multipoint RF
A terrestrial transmitter mast (like Emley Moor, Winter Hill, or Crystal Palace) broadcasts a single RF signal. Whether 10 people or 15 million people tune into the World Cup or New Year's Eve fireworks at 23:59, the transmitter output is identical. It never stutters, never throttles, and requires zero backhaul scaling.
IP streaming (Freely, iPlayer, ITVX) relies on unicast or localized multicast CDNs. When millions of households try pulling separate 15-25Mbps streams simultaneously, exchange backhaul, ISP routing tables, and CDN edge servers experience massive strain.

2. The 30–60 Second Latency Penalty
Anyone who has watched live football over IP knows the pain of your phone buzzing with a goal alert (or your neighbour on an aerial cheering) 45 seconds before the ball hits the back of the net on your stream. Terrestrial RF and Freesat satellite are virtually instantaneous (sub-second broadcast delay). Getting mass IP delivery to true zero-latency broadcast parity without packet drops at national scale is still a massive technical hurdle.

3. The Rural Bandwidth & Cost Divide
In metropolitan areas with symmetric 500Mbps FTTP, streaming everything sounds effortless. But across rural fringe valleys and outlying villages, millions of homes are still limping along on 15–30Mbps VDSL lines where line attenuation and cabinet distance choke speeds. You cannot run three concurrent HD streams while the rest of the household works or games on that connection.
More crucially, terrestrial TV is free-at-the-point-of-use emergency public infrastructure. Forcing every pensioner, low-income household, or rural resident to pay £30–£40/month for an active broadband subscription just to access BBC One and ITV is socially and politically unworkable.

4. The Hybrid Reality of Freely & Modern Tuners
Notice how Freely is actually built in real-world sets (Hisense, Bush, Toshiba) and upcoming tuners like the Manhattan Aero: they are hybrid devices. They use broadband for on-demand and IP-only channels, but they still feature standard DVB-T/T2 RF tuners on the back. When the home broadband drops or Wi-Fi jitters, the TV seamlessly falls back to the rooftop aerial.

Broadcast licences might evolve, and UHF spectrum will continue to be squeezed, but terrestrial RF aerial delivery will remain the robust backbone of UK television for a long time yet.