Brits refuse to pull plug on B&W TVs!

[Keefla]

Originally Posted by electroking

Yes, and the fee for a B/W set is cheaper. Nothing wrong with that, you
have to pay a fee for owning a car, right?

Never thought of it that way, reg fees for cars pay for roads like the reg fees for tv's pays for the broadcast.....fair enough i guess.

[Duke Nukem]

One of the advantages of a licence fee is that the beeb's programming is free from the disruption of adverts (though they are starting to adopt those annoying pop-ups that tell you whats on next grrr). Whilst the Government does initially get their grubby hands on the money before passing a portion of it on to the beeb, the beeb is free to criticise the government - any interference would cause an outcry.

I went back to a B&W licence a few years back now, when my modern colour set went seriously kaput. I relied upon a mid 60's dual standard B&W set, but because it wasn't a throw-away piece of junk I only switched it on when there was something I particularly wanted to watch. Most weeks I was down to <2 hours a week !

My mistake was buying a DVD player for elderly parent - the licence people saw the purchase (big brother!) and sent me a letter saying "You seem to have recently purchased a colour television ... " (followed by some carefully worded text that thinly disguised that they'd be sending the lads round to break my legs). Anyhow I contacted them but let slip that I had a VHS recorder. Since I could record from a colour terrestrial signal I had to have a colour licence, and as I needed a VHS recorded to modulate the set top box to UHF for ye olde telly, well, I went back to a modern colour (not monster flatscreen - shame on anyone who has one of those monstrosities)(Hi Jeffrey ).

Anyhow, the UK TV licence was introduced when the service resumed in 1946 (there was already a radio licence), but people who still had a current radio licence at that time could use their telly until that radio licence expired, so it was not until 1947 that licence figures truly reflected the number of sets in use (well, in theory!).

As for the "60 year old" 1980's Binatone, thats just owner's memory fade, however it is indicative of the lack of proper reserach that goes into reporting in general these days - certainly most of the newspapers are not to be considered reliable sources of information any more, but the beeb is considered reasonably good in this respect (though getting worse I'm afraid).

TTFN,
Jon

PS : @jhalphen, colour licence is currently £145.50

[Duke Nukem]

Digital TV is a little different over there.

I sure hope so - if your digital TV is as bad as ours then you have my sympathies!

Based on ancient MPEG2 technology, it started as a commercial pay-for service (OnDigital). The transmisisons were scrambled and there was a monthly subscription - I was one of the first! The picture quality was pretty good.

They went bust but were bought up by ITV ("ITV digital"), still pay-for. Went bust.

After maybe 6 months it arose pheonix-like as Freeview which is the current system. Its called "Free"view because only some of the channels are pay-to-view (such as UK Gold, which broadcasts a lot of the classic BBC programmes my licence fee paid for but now I'd have to pay even more to see ). The bit-rate has dropped and dropped as more channels have been crammed in (stations need to pay their own licence fee which ultimately ends up in the government coffers), and now that "HD" is being broadcast they've robbed the standard def channels of even more bandwidth, to such an extent that some channels are barely watchable - seriously, massive artifacts in fast moving scenes. But at least HD is MPEG4 and I wouldn't be shocked if in a few year the SD channels changed so people will have to buy new equipment yet again. Having said that, I've seen BBC HD and was not impressed - lacking detail and with different parts of a stationary scene changing position relative to each other all symptomatic of poor bitrate/encoder. Yet HD is being pushed when we aren't even getting the quality of SD; some channels transmit the picture as 540x576 (which stretches to widescreen) ... if you do the maths, even if the transmission were uncompressed then the bandwidth would be about the same as the 1936 405-line signal ! Now add a lot of compression on top of that and, well, you get the gist.

Sis + parent in Bristol (southern England) are now digital only, whilst here in Birmingham (central england) we are dual analogue digital but switchover is pending. This is accompanied by many propaganda adverts, how "digital is easier", accompanied by some old footage (50's?) of TV sets on a production line being set up by a boffin. However, my ma could tune an old telly - you turned the little dial til you saw the picture you want - but just can't cope with the multi-menu techy digital stuff which needs regular re-tuning as they keep fiddling with the channels - drives her mad as this usually means BBC1 switches to the Welsh language version!

Digital radio is also messed up, using an antiquated technology (MP2). The bandwidth has dropped and dropped (64Kb/s for rock music - and remember MP2 is no where near as good as MP3). In fact, to get a decent digital radio quality you have to pick it up on via Freeview which also receives some digital radio stations. For example BBC Radio 7, which broadcasts a lot of radio comedy, is 80Kb/s mono on radio but 256kb/s stereo on the TV set top box. Bizarre.

TTFN,
Jon

[peverett]

In the US we still have analog radio, both AM and FM. It is my understanding that there are no plans to change this. We also have digital radio. I have a digital radio, but to my ears it sounds just like FM.

I had heard that the UK is changing to all digital radio, but recently read that this is being re-considered due to all the analog radios in automobiles.

[andy]

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