The big analogue to digital television switchover has now begun in the UK, with the Copeland and Whitehaven areas of Cumbria in the North West of England losing their BBC2 terrestrial signal at 2am this morning. This is the start of a process which is expected to be completed by 2012.

The huge process is the beginning of the efforts to try and get the whole of the UK over to watching digital TV. It is expected to take five years for the whole country to be switched over to receiving a Digital signal, with the traditional analogue signal being lost forever in 2012.

In 1997 it was announced that digital TV would be the only option in the near future, and in 2001, the then Government Culture secretary Chris Smith suggested analogue signals would be switched off within ten years. This was despite over 30% of the public expressing no desire to have digital television in their homes. It now looks like the government will only miss their original target by about a year.

There’s no doubt that even just a few years ago the big switchover looked like being doomed to failure. That was when the whole ITV Digital debacle occurred, when independent broadcaster ITV set up a doomed digital television subscription service. Even though they spent a fortune on securing rights to Premiership soccer games, the take up of the service was tiny, causing the company to spectacularly go bust.

This rocked broadcasters in the UK, and made a viable alternative digital service hard to comprehend. It wasn’t until Freeview was created that digital TV really started to take off.

On October 30th 2002, the BBC backed Freeview started broadcasting in digital around the country. Although the number of channels at the low key launch was limited, the availability and low price of the set top boxes required to pick the Digital signal up, and the fact that the service was 100% free with no monthly subscription, meant the service soon flourished.

In the last five years Freeview has improved considerably, with many new channels such as Film4, Virgin 1 and Sky Three becoming available. The new hard drive technology from paid services BSkyB and Cable also aided the take up as more and more people realised the advantage of digital TV over analogue.

The UK now has the highest percentage of Digital television take up, estimated to be currently over 70%. The USA is sitting at just 55% take-up even though all analogue broadcasts will cease in early 2009. No other European country has even gone above 50%.

So the UK is leading the way with digital television services, and now the five year long analogue switch off has begun in earnest, that is sure to remain the case.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 3:27 pm under Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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