First 20 Towns/Cities for Local TV Announced
First 20 locations set to receive local TV are unveiled
The first ‘pioneer areas’ are expected to be: Belfast, Birmingham, Brighton and Hove, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Grimsby, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Plymouth, Preston, Southampton and Swansea.
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And it all seems a bit daft having a low bandwidth mux to carry menandmotors (or whatever) - its pre-DSO all over again.
Surely it'd be easier to find capacity on one of the existing muxs, for what local little content will be economic to produce?
The whole thing seems really stupid. A really inefficient coding system, which provides about 8 Mbps of bandwidth. Fine for two channels but Ofcom reckon this is good enough for three, which means there'll inevitably be four. Why not just use DVB-T2 and 16/64QAM? According to Ofcom's document, these new multiplexes are going to be at "modest" power levels compared to the 6 normal multiplexes. However, this is unlikely to be less than is currently used in pre-DSO areas (typically 10% power compared to post-DSO areas), so why is there such a need to use QPSK?
Also, the whole point of DTT is that it's regional. Freeview already has regional variations of the PSB channels depending on which transmitter your aerial is pointed at, so why can't we use the existing system for local TV? Then we could use this 7th multiplex for more HD channels on DVB-T2.
Using DVB-T will mean the service is available to a significantly larger number of people than DVB-T.
The aerial transmitter patterns look the limiting factor - Where I live will be outside of the coverage of the predicted Nottingham service dispite me being 2km as the bird flies from the city centre, and being able to get pre-DSO Freeview on an indoor aerial with ease! Oh, and it will be available across large swathes of Lincolnshire!
The Channel M experience shows why. Using QPSK gives a small margin against high power DTT frequencies and maximises the coverage.
Using 16QAM leaves no margin against high power muxes and reduces coverage (but allows more channels). Channel M have gone this way and lost much of their audience. The margin between high power DTT and local TV, means that the local TV signal is ignored as background noise, or is beyond the capacity of the receiver.
Future receivers will have more overload capacity to protect against 4G and I assume this will help with low power local TV reception.
Using DVB-T2 would improve matters. But the local TV Cos would want the maximum audience which means DVB-T.
As local TV will only produce one channel in any area, any surplus capacity can be used to pay for the technical infrastructure. In this proposal Arqiva get two channels in a quasi national network. I think it will work as long as Arqiva aren't allowed to increase their own channels if the coding changed to DVB-T2 in the future.
At least we got left off it, good, people won't be asking for money to run it, as I doubt they will get enough advertising to keep it running for long.
I can't imagine a local T.v here would be that interesting, Today Hereford united loses ( Again), the weather is cloudy and there is a market in the city centre.
that will fill about half a hour
I see Inverness is in the second batch.
so where will it broadcast from? The Rosemarkie transmitter where 99% of people's aerials point now? or the tiny inverness relay that's only used by a handful who are in a shadow from Rosemarkie?
If the latter, then I can see the other 99% won't be bothered to go to the trouble of a second aerial just for a tiny local station.
When will that sort of detail be published?
http://maps.ofcom.org.uk/localtv/index.html
Inverness predicted coverage map using Rosemarkie
http://ofcom.org.uk/static/maps/localtv/hi-res/Inverness.png
(The licensees can to some degree change the TX site - e.g. in Nottingham they may choose to use a new site closer to the city than Waltham (in addition to Nottingham) - the aerial pattern may also differ)
Yes, I live only nine miles to the south-southeast of Guildford, but my own aerial points at the Midhurst transmitter (Meridian region), which is in a totally different direction. Most people around here use Midhurst, as it gives much better reception due to transmitter power combined with the local topography.
Thanks
I guess they can also choose the tx power, so even though I'm (just) in that coverage area, if the tx power is low, I might not receive it.
Yet another gross expansion of a monopoly.
But the difference now is that the broadcasting is free onwards from the signal leaving the local TV studios. Also the BBC are paying for certain start up costs and commissioning programmes.
Plus the government has an interest in local TV succeeding, so that MPs can get on your TV.
I hope it succeeds. It has a better chance than the old days.
There was something a few years back on one of the BBc interactive channels before they ditched most of them. I remember a mate of mine and his singing partner was on there.
That was localish, but also died a death
so we can have our MP propaganda on T.V as well as on radio and in the local papers.
Plus the idea that people in 2012 will want or bother with a local tv channel that most people cant even pick up. That world doesnt exist anymore. In a Multichannel world (even with FreeviewLite) there are simply too many channel choices, and most people will (and are) be tuned to one of those.
Even if you give the channel its own web site, the problem of "choice" is still there - even more so. Why would people bother with that site compared with the other few million sites out there. Many (most if you look this stuff up) towns have a local web site, and the content is not the issue - the problem is gettng enough people to use the site. From what I have seen, some have hardly any user activity.
But don't worry, they'll still build and run it all, but they'll only be making a profit on service contracts for the transmitters, not the carriage, as that will be used to fund MuxCo, who will in turn, pay Arqiva. So Arqiva wins, again.
The licensees will have to make do with advertising revenue, which the government have said they can do nothing to help sort out. So left to themselves they'll generate next to nothing and fold within months.
I'd rather they'd have spent the £40 million from the beeb actually on the beeb, as opposed to just pissing it up the wall, lining Arqiva's pockets and providing a sub-par TV offering to the handful of homes that will be able to receive it.
Whoever wins it is going to need to pay Arqiva anyway - seams likely they would be able to mount the cheapest bid (as they can leverage there existing equipment and personnel and won't need to spend too much time gaining access to sites) - the last thing we want is to end up with local TV coming from "Bolton Water Tower" and the like.
Spot on - shame the BBC or perhaps Channel 4 wasn't allowed to continue with their local tv trial - seams rather wasteful to have a whole multiplex for what will effectively be 90 minutes or so of programming a day on a loop.
Heck this would be the ideal sort of thing to fit around some channels - imagine BBC Knowledge being resurrected and having Nottingham TV news and local programming at set times, More 4 + and having Derby TV news and local programming at the same set times, and PBS UK with Leicester news and local programming at set times.
You'd end up with some channels showing quality documentaries and drama from the BBC, Channel 4 and American tv archives mixed with more recent material - and a way of giving more visibility to local tv!
The capacity could then be "gifted" on a beauty contest basis - i.e. Nottingham TV would only pay production costs and the costs of getting the programming to the BBC East Midlands studios, and the BBC would the be responsible for getting it to air
To be fair, the water tower was actually a very good site for Channel M's analogue service. However, it too was an Arqiva site.
I think we will see a lot of "sponsored by" banks, flower shops, car sales etc.
If I were the type of business person to buy advertising on a service like that, I'd want to see viewing figures. Same as if I was buying radio advertising, I'd want to see RAJAR results for the station I was buying from.
Surely part of that beauty pageant is going to be how much it costs the local tv licensee to gain access to the multiplex - which is where Arqiva will have the upper hand.
As noted above local TV has a very limited appeal, if local news, sports and lifestyle programing was mixed in with a national channel then maybe.
Also there is the money issue, okay local firms want to advertise but they can do it cheaper on the radio and get to a fairly wide audience while local TV adverts will cost more and not reach the same levels.
And here is the big one how much broadcast time are we really talking about? A few hours a day then when if it's peak early evening local and national news on BBC and ITV cover the major local issues and general interest in snappy chunks.
I just don't see this being viable unless someone has one heck of a clever rabbit to pull out of the hat.
It could just be one long advert for the local MP, a handful of big firms with the odd person popping up talking about bulbs and 2CV's. I'll admit I might be wrong but what can a "local" TV channel really do and can it keep going for any real length of time.
As I see it there are plenty of other cheaper means to sell the region or town you live in and obtain adverts and keep people informed that hit the local population and do a better job.
But I am willing to wait and see we all might get a nice surprise.