Freeview is broken ...
20apr24 0v3
https://poelposition.blogspot.com/2024/04/advertising-is-root-of-much-evil.html
https://poelposition.blogspot.com/2024/04/advertising-is-root-of-much-evil.html
I have been watching the reruns of the excellent BBC Spooks MI5 drama that kicked off in 2002, and ran for some 85 episodes. As contemporary drama goes, it is still as good as it gets, and not hopelessly woke.
Add on the Freeview Drama Channel over the past month, it runs for 80 mins per episode. 60 mins of content padded with 20 mins of commercials. That's 25% of the audience's leisure time. This is not "free". At minimum wage, that's £2.50 an episode.
But worse is the way the constant advert interruptions destroy the watchability of a show like Spooks, which was not designed for multiple five-minute ad breaks. Thankfully, watching using the BBC iPlayer does not waste time with commercials, although the UI is slow and clunky, compared to a decent PVR. Which really matters with shows like Spooks, where you may want to pause and replay sections for maximum value.
Now, if you record off-air to a PVR, you can skip the commercial breaks fairly accurately as they are almost exactly five minute - which is handy since many PVR >>FF functions include a minute skip; don't feel guilty, because you've already paid for the series through your TV licence fee.
Now check out these sites that describe the problems of Freeview, whose remaining UHF spectrum is now being prepared to be sold off eventually - all broadcast bandwidth is in danger of being sold for mobile communications and data. Which is a topic for another rant in due course.
Then here's a review of the problems at http://about.freeviewing.com
It's clear that the government and Ofcom have been disingenuous since 2000 when encouraging people to waste money on buying digital TV kit and services that they know can never work reliably in the long term. I found a 2002 email to Patricia Hewitt who was then DTI minister, telling her why it wouldn't work and suggesting a practical alternative that was ignored, of course.
Senior staff at Freeview and Ofcom (DCMS) should be well aware of the potential aggravation lurking in this problem, but nobody wants to say anything on the record about anything, and certainly not accept any sort of responsibility!
These days it's not difficult to sell the idea that politicians, experts and civil servants have been misleading the people. Although in the great scheme of the endlessly unfolding litany of public malfeasance, being just a bit nerdy and technical, this is a harder sell than any.
A £5bn class action to get some of that spectrum cash paid to the victims would be a wonderful dowry for the next government.
However, IPTV should now be a massive earner for UK innovation as the UK had a world leading position in IPTV since 1997, with Amino of Cambridge, now rebranded as Aferian... it's been a wild ride after an enthusiastic 2004 IPO raised a substantial fighting fund that valued the business at £61m. But the past couple of years have been commercially disastrous, as the market capitalization fell to £14m. I suspect because they stuck with their historic penchant for hardware too long before accepting the future was software players incorporating smart payment solutions using cloud servers from infrastructure specialists.
The way the UK TV and media industry has failed to transition from UHF broadcast to the streaming future is criminally negligent, with ITV making a right pig's ear of several failed attempts with ONTv and ITV digital, and the BBC having several stabs at iPlayer, before ending up with something workable. The government in the shape of the DCMS (and BBC/C4) has played the UK's hand quite poorly - while Netflix, Amazon and AppleTV defined the genre that could so easily have leveraged the UK's once legendary prowess in the creative arts, and written the next chapter of the BBC's story that began back in the 1920s.
I wrote a brief summary of the state of UK broadcastuing in a post from April 2022 when the Ukraine invasion exposed the parlous state of the UK's global reach when the BBC struggled to reach into homes of Russians with objective reports about the invasion.
In addition to the Amino/Aferian general IPTV platforms, there is another excellent online solution from Perception.TV. This has the option for smart advertising (IncenTV) and granular pay per view functionality over the open internet - outside a telco/service provider network.
IncenTV is about getting a grip on the advertising market that is used to pay for so-called "free content", and making it less annoying and more rewarding.
I have been studying this market - tech and business models - since the last century, hoping to work out a better way of monetizing content than stealing viewers' valuable leisure time - and selling it to advertisers as part of a massive spyware operation.
The core issue for me is the excessive advertising on all digital tv channels - UHF and satellite - amounting to 15 or 20 minutes an hour of wasted viewer time. This is time that is stolen from viewers and sold to advertisers. And in the case of content originally created for BBC television, it has already been bought and paid for by the licence player!
How about WE get paid to watch TV?
And a lot of the better content from the golden age of TV in the 70s 80s and 90s appears to be orphaned in terms of rights ownership which has been commandeered as windfall benefit by broadcasters who then smother it in commercials that's no viewer wants to waste their time with. It's highly unlikely that the surviving performers in those TV shows are getting any sort of residual value, where the companies involved have long since ceased to exist.
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 around 2012.
In the course of that work I discovered a shortcoming of the Freeview platform - it's 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 of several transmitters the receiver can "see" (with signal levels ranging from marginal to solid) to lock onto and use. 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.
To cut a long strory short, where this is not clearly defined in fringe areas, it will affect reception and can make a mess of 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 - which may be unpredcitanbly affected by transient atmospheric conditions.
To cut a long strory short, where this is not clearly defined in fringe areas, it will affect reception and can make a mess of 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 - which may be unpredcitanbly affected by transient atmospheric conditions.
I have wasted many hours attempting to get answers about fixes from the main broadcasters to no effect, as the buck is passed 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 candid enough to come out and admit the scope of the problem. This is a genuiine conspiracy, not a theory!
I can only conclude 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 viewer time with tedious interrupt commercials.
This view is confirmed by "Informal advice" from ofcom (a senior tech manager, too fearful for his civil service pension to want to be identified). I was advised not to waste my time, but use an online option for reception - and stream it over the internet, because thereis no way make the band4 UHF service reliable in many areas of the country. As explained here...
The terms and conditions of the go-to web community for UK TV aficionados is the digitalspy.con forum - which provides a deep insight into the way the industry farms it's 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 skipable/avoidable. The way in which commercial streaming services specifically prevent commercial breaks being skipped feels like punishment.
The use of any sort of remote for morew than just zapping between channels is a compromise. It doesn't replace a proper keyboard, but has improved over time Speech recogntion helps, but is still not yet quite sotred. Use of smartphone app is another bundle of compromises,
I tried to find my way around with the Amazon fire streaming device (an HDMI dongle) to explore the Rugby World Cup on ITV/X - for which I can pay a reasonable monthly ransom to rescue my time. But to find any action and then nip around navigating through the content - like I can simply - with the PVR wa s a nightmare. I just want to scream as every opportunity to insert a commercial has been taken and the whole program stumbles and lurches along ...and becomes unwatchable.
The Perception.TV platform has a comprehenive EPG and useful timeline markers that let users skip about through the dross and create "user generated" highlights for content - but not avilable in the UK yet.
Searching without the keyframe clues is frustrating. Ofcom should do something useful for once, an lay down guidelines/rules about the way programs now waste viewer time with the imposition of tedious frameworks for marketing and advertising - not information and entertainment delivery. There should always be an option to pay a ransom to release viewers' wasted time.
Plus there is now over an hour of waffle and commercials from the scheduled start of the prog to any action, with a sporting event like F1 these days. Grrrr....
The social aspects of TV "shared" watching are not being developed as far as I can see - Gogglebox has proved there is a demand. So let's work at it...
Meanwhile the universal hatred of interrupt advertising is not being addressed. So users conducting a "hosted session" should be able to choose commercials they think will appeal to their "following" and share IncenTV rewards. A "host" that did not relay ads imposing woke social engineering values, or distorted representations of demographics, will be popular in Essex...
So what about the headline reference to evil? Well, advert revenue is money, and the weaponisation of advertiser patronage by activists eager to pounce on any content ;provider that offends a woke and EDI agenda, can be pure evil.
This is an idea I shall develop in due course.
Work in Progress
(C) WSP 2024
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