The evolution of TV from 405 line band1 broadcast VHF, to Online TV

Started V1.0 22oct23

Updated V1.21 20:00 18mar24

The story of broadcast media: from an X post at https://x.com/wpoel/status/1769458332698337614

This is a tale for media nerds. I will be interested to see who can be arsed to read it and comment - and I will happily incorporate and amalgamate comments as it rolls along. But it seems like a good waypoint in the story of media to look back over broadcast TV and note its passing.

Strategically, the total dependence on online access for all our information and entertainment creates insane vulnerabilities in society, when with a fraction of the power the government is about to control, we have already been spun into a multi-trillion dollar frenzy of conspiracy and false narratives, by the so-called elites of globalisation and their apparently compliant mainstream media cohorts. 

The end of TV as we knew it... (part one)

17mar24

V1.1

Traditional broadcast TV executives who have been following the progress of YouTube and Twitter/X over the past couple of years all now know their game is totally up, and traditional broadcast is a waste of transmitter electricity and wireless bandwidth that can be better used by mobile phones. As long as Internet access is universally available... and if it isn't, you might as well be living in s cave and hunting a woolly mammoth.
And now only sport has any realtime-critical value that an audience will pay for, and that is also mostly moving to on-demand pay per view (PPV). Even breaking news is now thoroughly overtaken by X and YouTube as well as numerous websites.
During this evolution, the commercial judgment required to adapt to the fast-evolving technology was not much in evidence at ITV, whose executive board was still dismissively referring to its digital R&D as "Jokes and Novelties" in 1999.
Those early TV execs were mostly from commercial publishing backgrounds where the skill is the simple but basic understanding that a commercial publishing medium is funded from advert revenue - which is derived from connecting an eager seller, with a rather less eager purchaser.... and trying to maintain the contact for as long as possible - this was an early manifestation of an attention economy.
Matching content to the audience is a simple challenge with a universe of 30m "general public" viewers. The early days of analogue TV were "one size fits all" uncomplicated - the audience response was gauged from (next day) sales of toothpaste, soap powder, petfood etc. - classic high-volume FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) for a general audience demographic.
The way the ads could be matched to an audience or "targeted" was to place them close to programmes that defined a likely audience. Soap Operas traditionally reach the female audience who buy (don't cancel me please) soap...
When ITV was introduced in 1955 various TV execs described it as a license to print money. It was indeed "fat city" during the years of ITV regional monopolies until the stuttering introduction of multichannel digital (1998) the year after Channel 5 - the last analogue service - was launched.
Government had been long aware of the power of broadcasting to establish and influence the social agenda of the nation (and beyond) The BBC was a vital war resource by the time of WW2 - and so the government controlled all aspects very closely - and then clung on to control after the war. Originally as a function of the Post Office that was responsible for licensing receivers and transmitters - then latterly taken over by Ofcom. Digital TV started the erosion and dissipation of the giant analogue audiences - once regularly 15-20m for prime time - across 20 or more digital channels. So the arrival of multi-channel competition was a new challenge.
The original incarnation of digital TV (ONdigital) failed badly, since up to then the TV broadcast industry had led a charmed life with content needed for just 4 channels. It was a money-printing machine and there was little concern for cost efficiency as advertisers were willing to pay the asking price for the scarce advertising inventory to create instant (and measurable demand) from a mass audience, the competition was between the FMCG brand giants to bid for the prime advert slots, not commercial broadcasters who had a simple formulaic approach to content scheduling. The US experience where cable TV had established a different dynamic was a preview of the coming digital world where cable provided an optional subscription supplement to the existing FTA broadcast services, and content providers could easily test the appetite for premium services such as sports and current cinema movies.
TV had become a collection of set-top and set-side boxes with cable and satellite connections - each with multiple different subscription options and many with bespoke access control, using smart cards.
It took a surprisingly long time to replace the mayhem with a single Internet connection, with sufficient bandwidth to deliver multiple subscriptions and free (advert supported) services. But now it has been, available across a very large part of the world.

This is being serialised at

https://poelposition.blogspot.com/2023/10/online-tv-delivery-is-stealing-your.html

The end of TV as we knew it... (part two)

Started 17Mar24 V.0 (come back laters!)

Freeview is fundamentally broken -  and the online alternative delivery players are all plagued by advert insertion troubles, with 15 minutes per hour of unskippable commercials. This is not a satisfactory alternative to the originally proposed UHF broadcast service.

The UK's Online TV players are a shambles. I speak with some authority as I have been involved observing the evolution from the earliest days of IPTV in the mid 90s, (following pioneers like Video eXtreme, and Real Networks using dial-up modems) and then the launch of a joint venture with BT called Enfocast in 1999 -  which BT strangled when it demonstrated how to undercut the main BT digital satellite TV service platform by a factor of 10.

Then I was involved with the YouView consortium - led by former TalkTalk boss Dido Harding, who hired my old boss Lord Sugar (from the time I worked with him in the 1980s on Amstrad's Computer developments)  - to sort out the stalled software development of the reference Humax set-top box (STB) in 2012. I was involved in exploring certain "propagation anomalies" that pretty much confirmed the UK's choice of UHF DTT platform was always going to be subject to compromised performance - thanks to certain immutable laws of physics affecting signal propagation.

Background information at...

See www.freeviewing.com - then About.freeviewing.com

BBC and ITV own a vast stockpile of quality drama and comedy programming that is not being given the best chance when being played out with poor contrast and fuzzy master recordings - although it seems to be improving all the time.

AI enhanced remastering/processing can easily fix issues like contrast, jitter, colour correction and even focus.  The TV production industry probably doesn't want to see the "pre-woke" classics given a relaunch since they will get in the way of new productions and shrink the market. A 20-year-old episode of Spooks is an entire "James Bond class" movie in 90 minutes. The bar for new content has been set high.

I recently searched for a Bergerac episode (series1episode1) on an Amazon HDMI firestick when the woefully unreliable off-air Freeview Drama channel 20 "broke up" 15 minutes from the end of the episode.  I searched and found the episode easily enough on BritBox, so I installed the BritBox app and "signed in", as I had subscribed previously on a Huawei STB provided by Talk Talk, but I was still fitted up with another sub by Amazon's inertia sales effort! (since cancelled), it is not yet a joined-up process.,

Anyway, I have a cunning plan as it's clear the government and Ofcom have been disingenuous by encouraging/instructing people to waste money on buying digital TV kit and services that they knew can never work reliably.  I found a 2002 email to Patricia Hewitt (who was then the responsible DTI minister), telling her why it wouldn't work and suggesting a practical alternative which was ignored, of course.

Senior staff at Freeview and Ofcom should be well aware of the potential aggravation lurking in this problem, and nobody wants to say anything about anything contentious - and certainly not accept any sort of responsibility!  I cannot get any reaction from any part of the industry - everyone has doubtless got me marked down as a nerd/fanatic who will give up and go away if ignored. 

But it's not now difficult to sell the concept that politicians, experts, commercial "cartel" interests and the government have been lying to the people these days, is it?

A £5bn class action to get some of that Band 4 spectrum cash paid to the victims would be a wonderful legacy for Keir Starmer to inherit. Maybe Liam Byrne could write a note for the incoming Culture Secretary..?  But we are still waiting for the perfect online TV solution based on - for example - the latest www.perception.tv platform that could include IncenTV for a more imaginative commercial angle, and much more functionality.

Let's be clear - the content on UKTVplay and other online players for commercial channels is not free to watch. 

As usual, we are being deliberately starved of the truth...
and Ofcom is complicit as usual.

The technical issues create the social issue - which is about the grotesquely excessive advertising on Freeview digital tv channels - amounting to 15 or 20 minutes an hour of stolen/wasted viewer time. The time that is stolen from viewers is sold to advertisers who then add insult to injury and irritate viewers with endless unskippable commercials no one wants. And in the case of content originally created for BBC television, it has already been bought and paid for by the licence payer - frequently over 20 years ago when few had a clue about the "long tail revenue" opportunity that was coming!  But the commercial break interruptions are so massive and invasive that many excellent drama shows are simply unwatchable when chopped.

Yet a lot of the better content from the golden age of British TV in the 70s 80s and 90s appears to be orphaned or otherwise "confused" in terms of ongoing rights ownership, which has been commandeered as a windfall benefit by broadcasters, who then strangle it with commercials.  It's unlikely that the surviving performers in those TV shows are getting any sort of residual royalty where the companies involved have long since ceased to exist. And arguably since no one back in that time would have ever envisaged that the shows would have a viewing life extending beyond 50 years, a different approach needs to be taken on the best ways to use "long-tailed content" and reward those that still need rewarding.

The argument that the vintage politically incorrect but vastly more entertaining content is taking viewers away from new woke productions - contrived and created in the age of social engineering and the woke straight jacket. All of which has led to the cancel culture which has managed to wring nearly all the joy out of entertainment in the past ten years and inflicted McIntyre's "The Wheel", Mrs Brown's Boys and the various confused iterations of "Doctor WTF..." 

I have had Freeview TV in the shape of the YouView implementation for the past 12 years, using a set-top box personal video recorder provided by Humax and then Huawei, by TalkTalk. I was actually involved in the early development of the system when invited by my old boss Alan Sugar to become involved in the testing process, after he was engaged to sort out the development mess which was delaying the completion and roll out of YouView in 2012.

In the course of that work I discovered a shortcoming of the Freeview platform - its inability to sort out multiple transmitters in areas where signal levels were likely to fluctuate due to topographical and atmospheric conditions. In essence, the system is confused and does not know which transmitter to lock onto, and in the case of commercial broadcasting, this is a problem since regional advertising inserts different commercials that require the location of the receiver to be identified - in order to be tuned to the correct local transmitter. Where this is not clearly defined in fringe areas, it will affect reception and can confound attempts to record TV series when one or more of the episodes is subject to poor reception as a result of confusing the receiver with multiple signals.

I have wasted many hours attempting to get answers from the main broadcasters to no effect, as the buck is passed glibly between the broadcasters and platform operators with nobody accepting any responsibility - including Ofcom and the BBC. Almost certainly because they know it is technically impossible and therefore pointless to make promises that they know cannot be kept - although they are not willing to come out and admit the problem.

So I have reached the conclusion that they know there is no cure, and the only answer was to say nothing and hope that those effected viewers would simply give up and go away, or be satisfied with the compromise of online delivery that will waste up to 20 minutes an hour of viewer time with unwanted commercials.

This is confirmed by "Informal advice" from Ofcom - via a senior tech manager, too fearful for his civil service pension to want to be identified - was not to waste my time, but use the online option for reception, and stream it over the internet, because there was no possibility to make the band4 UHF service reliable in many areas of the country. (This is further explained at about.freeviewing.com)

The terms and conditions of the go-to web community for UK TV aficionados is the digitalspy.com forum - which provides a deep insight into the way the industry farms its audiences and exploits personal data that it sells to advertisers https://www.hearst.co.uk/privacy-notice

Online delivery versus off-air recording to a PVR means the adverts are not avoidable. The way in which commercial streaming services specifically prevent ad breaks being fast forwarded, feels like punishment.

Simply navigating through the content - like I can with the PVR playback - is just not possible. I want to scream as every opportunity to insert a woke-washed commercial has been taken, and the whole "wounded" program stumbles along ...and becomes unwatchable.

The Perception TV platform has a proper EPG and useful timeline markers that enable users to skip about through the dross and create "user generated" highlights for content. This whole thing has got a long way to go to be less annoying!

Searching without the key frame clues is frustrating. An ability to play back with audio-corrected 1.25-1.5x speed would be helpful. Ofcom should do something useful for once, and lay down guidelines/rules about the way programs now waste viewers' time. Mostly just get out of the way!

There should always be an option to pay the ransom to buy viewers' wasted time back on all commercial content.  And we can watch without an hour of intro waffle and ads to skip, from the start of the prog before any action with any sport event these days.