Freeview

Categories: British television

Image:Freeviewtv.gif

Freeview is a free-to-air digital television service in the United Kingdom broadcast from terrestrial transmitters using the DVB-T standard. Launched on October 30 2002 at 6am, it took over the DTT licence on four multiplexes to broadcast from the defunct ITV Digital which itself replaced ONdigital.

Unlike ITV Digital and the cable and satellite digital TV services, it offers no subscription, premium, or pay-per-view channels. All that is needed to receive the Freeview service is a set-top box costing around £30 to £100, or a new television with an integrated digital tuner. This is in addition to the annual television licence that all viewers of broadcast television in the UK must purchase irrespective of whether they receive it via satellite, cable or their aerial.

The Freeview consortium originally consisted of the BBC, Crown Castle UK (now National Grid Wireless) and British Sky Broadcasting, but were joined by ITV plc and Channel 4 on 11 October 2005. The service broadcasts free-to-air television channels, radio stations and interactive services from the BBC, Sky, and various other broadcasters.

In addition to Freeview, a subscription-based service, Top Up TV, launched in March 2004 using unused channel space. The Top Up TV service is not a part of the Freeview service; it runs alongside it on the DTT platform, and can be received using a Freeview set-top box or television equipped with a card slot (which not all models possess). The Digital Network Group, made up of all the multiplex owners, is responsible for co-ordination between these services.

At the end of 2004, it was reported that over 5 million households in the UK have Freeview, making it the second-most popular digital TV format in the UK.

Contents

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Full list of Freeview channels

Note: this list shows all free-to-air digital terrestrial channels. Although not all are technically part of Freeview, all are available to Freeview viewers

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TV channels

See also: List of UK Digital Terrestrial television channels

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Radio stations

See also: List of UK Digital Terrestrial radio channels

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The multiplexes

Digital Terrestrial channels in the United Kingdom are broadcast in six groups, or multiplexes (sometimes abbreviated mux) — the multiplexes are labelled 1, 2, A, B, C, and D. Each multiplex represents a certain amount of bandwidth, which can be used for any combination of compressed video, audio, and data. Within a multiplex it is possible to make trade offs between the number of channels and the quality of the picture and audio. Each of these multiplexes was given to the control of a different company, and they uniformly decided to go for quantity of channels over quality of service.

When the British government allocated the multiplexes, it gave half the capacity on a multiplex to each existing analogue terrestrial broadcaster. This meant the BBC got a multiplex to themselves, ITV and Channel 4 shared the second, five and S4C shared the third. The remaining space was then auctioned off. A consortium of Granada and Carlton (then members of the ITV network, now merged) along with BSkyB successfully bid for, and set-up, the OnDigital (later ITV Digital) service. ITV Digital collapsed following a League Football deal that they were reckoned to have significantly overpaid for in 2002. The multiplexes were consequently taken over by a consortia of the BBC, Crown Castle UK (who operate the transmission network, and are now known as National Grid Wireless) and BSkyB. In May 2004, a new service (Top Up TV) was launched to provide subscription content in unused space on Multiplexes 2 and A. In September 2005 Top Up TV began operating soley on Multiplex A (now owned by ITV plc), with Channel 4 reclaiming the bandwidth on Multiplex 2 for their own services.

Multiplex 1 - BBC

  • TV: BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, CBBC Channel, BBC News 24
  • Radio: BBC Radio Scotland (Scotland only), BBC Radio nan Gaidheal (Scotland Only), BBC Radio Ulster (Northern Ireland only), BBC Radio Foyle (Northern Ireland Only), BBC Radio Wales (Wales only), BBC Radio Cymru (Wales only)
  • Interactive Services: BBCi

Multiplex 2 - Digital 3 and 4 (an ITV and Channel 4 consortium)

  • TV: ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, Channel 4, GMTV, GMTV 2, E4, ITV News, More4
  • Interactive Services: Teletext on 4, Teletext

Multiplex A - ITV plc (It is not known if the multiplex is part of Freeview following ITV plc's announcement [1])

  • TV: Five, ABC1 (not in Wales), S4C Digidol (Wales only), S4C~2 (Wales only), Tele-G (Scotland only), QVC (reduced hours in Wales), bid tv (reduced hours in Wales), UKTV Gold*, TCM*, Boomerang*, Cartoon Network*, Discovery Channel*, Discovery Real Time*, Television X*, UKTV Style*, UKTV Food*, Bloomberg*, British Eurosport*, Toonami*, price-drop.tv
  • Radio: BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 (FM version), Mojo, Heat.

Multiplex B - BBC

  • TV: BBC Four, CBeebies, BBC Parliament, Community Channel
  • Radio: BBC 1Xtra, BBC Radio Five Live, BBC Five Live Sports Extra, BBC 6 Music, BBC 7, BBC Asian Network
  • Interactive: BBCi (extra content), 701/702/703 (Channel 703 carries BBC Parliament and news loops for BBCi which are only accesible via interactive services)

Multiplex C - National Grid Wireless

  • TV: Sky Three, Sky News, UKTV History, Sky Sports News, E4 +1
  • Radio: talkSPORT, 3C, Premier Radio

Multiplex D - National Grid Wireless

  • TV: UKTV Bright Ideas, The Hits, ftn, The Music Factory|TMF, Thomas Cook TV, Ideal World, Men & Motors
  • Radio: BBC World Service (English language European version), The Hits Radio, Smash Hits!, Kiss 100, Magic 105.4, Q, Oneword, Jazz FM 102.2, Kerrang!

* indicates a Pay TV service

Also see Multiplex Lineup on Digital Spy website (includes channels grouped by multiplex, listed with EPG number and links to channel websites).

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Use of multiplexing technology

The astute reader will notice that some of these multiplexes carry a much larger number of services than others. Firstly, a number of services share bandwidth — so some channels turn off when others are on. (For example one will never see CBeebies and BBC Four on air at the same time, as they use the same space in Multiplex B, with CBeebies broadcasting from 6am until 7pm and BBC Four from 7pm onwards. The situation is the same for CBBC and BBC Three) In addition, some multiplexes have fewer channels so as to allocate more data to fewer services, thus ensuring higher quality (for example, BBC One on Multiplex 1 is carried as a 4.4 Megabit stream, while Sky Sports News typically uses 2 Megabits per second.)

On top of this, the modulation of the multiplexes can be varied to squeeze higher digital bitrates out of the same portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This comes at the cost of making it harder to get a good signal. There are three basic modulation schemes currently in use in the UK; in order of bandwidth efficiency, they are: QPSK (only used for tests in the Oxford and London areas), 16 QAM and 64 QAM, each with a progressively higher bitrate, at the cost of progressively higher likelihood of signal degradation. Currently multiplexes 2 and A use 64 QAM (and are consequently more prone to poor reception) while the other multiplexes all currently use 16 QAM.

Furthermore, multiplexes can make use of statistical multiplexing at the MPEG video coder whereby the bitrate allocated to a channel within the multiplex can vary dynamically depending on how difficult it is to code the picture content at that precise time, and how much demand there is for bandwidth from other channels. In this way, complex pictures with lots of detail may demand a higher bitrate at one instant and this can result in the bitrate allocated to another channel in the same multiplex being reduced if the second channel is currently transmitting pictures which are easier to code, with less fine detail. The only channel on the DTT system not to use statistical multiplexing, i.e. has a constant bit rate, is BBC ONE. This is so the English Regions and Nations can perform a simple transmultiplex, or T-Mux, operation and insert their local version of BBC ONE over the London feed straight into the existing BBC Mux 1 without any complex or time consuming decoding.

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New compression technology

is and other multiplexes. The additional capacity has been achieved by technology developments that have allowed the company to broadcast the additional channels using limited bandwidth. The two slots were made available for bidding earlier this year, and due to the limited capacity on the DTT service in the UK, broadcasters bid in millions in order to gain bandwidth. ITV won the bidding for the first slot (on which it launched Men & Motors on May 2, 2005), and Channel 4 the second. Channel 4 launched E4 +1, as opposed to its new channel More4, on the multiplex when the slot became available on June 1 (E4 launched on Freeview on May 27). National Grid Wireless have made a new slot available on Multiplex D using the same compression techniques as above. The 18 hour channel, running from 6am to midnight, will become available on December 1. Companies interested had until November 1 to submit their bids.

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7 Day EPG

On Monday 26 July 2004 the 7 Day Electronic Program Guide began to roll out across the country. This technology, tested earlier in the year, means that users are able to view a full week of programme schedules on specially enabled Freeview Boxes. Most boxes carry a "Now and Next" EPG.

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New Channel Launches

Sky Three, a spin-off from Sky One and Sky Mix has launched on Freeview on 31 October 2005. The channel will show programmes from a variety of Sky channels 12-18 months after their initial showing on their satellite channels. It replaced Sky Travel.

ITV4, a channel targeted at a male audience, has launched on 1 November 2005.

ITV is also preparing to launch a new children's channel, to broadcast during ITV4's downtime. The currently unnamed channel will launch on 11 February 2006.

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Future Changes

Longer term, the British Government has indicated it would like to turn the analogue services off entirely, starting in some regions from 2008, with the last analogue transmissions ceasing in 2012. There remain numerous obstacles to this however, including the large number of people who have no desire to recieve more than the four or five channels they presently have, and who may find the new technology confusing. Also they will be reluctant to buy a digital box in order to view the channels they have had for free for so long. The government has been discussing plans to pay for the switchover for the over 75's

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See also

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External links