HDTV Services
HDTV is an ever growing trend that has gained some serious momentum over the past few years. Most of television channels today are offering their services in HD format, provided you signed up an HD Host. Some of the popular HD providers are:
SkyHD
Sky’s investment in high-definition broadcasting is the single largest since the satellite company first launched. Not many details have been revealed, but they’ve certainly made a name for themselves in the TV industry. Sky is one of the companies that require your television to have HDCP-compliant inputs so copying any broadcast is impossible. In order to receive SkyHD, you’ll need to purchase three things: 1) A SkyHD Box that is priced around £299; 2) There is also a monthly subscription fee of £10, and 3) you must have an HD ready television.
BBC HD
The BBC, just now, has gotten through their Freeview launch, and the next major project for BBC HD is the analogue service switch-off. Therefore, while an expensive HD rollout is a long ways away, the BBC still faces problems. HDTV-enabled countries like America and Japan won’t pay as much for programs that are not in high definition. The BBC has committed to film all of their content in HD by 2010. Unfortunately by that time, other services such as SkyHD should have made a bigger impact in the market.
Freeview
During the time I was doing research for this article, all the sources say there are no plans set in stone for HDTV to be available through Freeview. Television broadcasters are questioning and consistently asking the regulator company called ‘Ofcom’ for bandwidth in order to provide HD, unfortunately their answer is, “…there’s no available space.”
In May of 2006, an exclusive trial began in London on the Crystal Palace transmitter in order to test the service. However, being an exclusive test, this is was not available to the public and special decoding hardware was required. Results of the test in November of 2006 were encouraging; unfortunately there are no published plans for Freeview HDTV appearing any day soon.
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Posted by Brian on September 19th, 2007 filed in Television |
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