A couple of stories. First off, Mediaguardian has the story (free registration reqd.) that a couple of small Welsh villages are the first in the land to become digital-only. In many respects, it’ll be areas like this that’ll be the most problematical in the fullness of rollout. It’ll take a lot of transmitters to get the signals into all those valleys.
The story mentions “retuning videos” – well guess what. That’s not the problem. You can’t retune a video like many had to be for the arrival of Channel Five. You have to somehow attach a box to the video seperately. But let’s think of the problems this is really going to entail until we all have new videos. Suppose you plan an evening of TV, watching BBC1 but at the same time programming your video to record first a programme on ITV, and then later on BBC 2. You have one box attached to your TV for the BBC1 picture, whilst another has to be attached to your video. And if you thought setting videos was complicated in the past, you’re going to love the next bit. You’ll need to set your video to record an AV channel, at the correct times, then program the timer on the box attached to the video to switch channels at the correct time. It’s possible that this might be made easier by an EPG, but suddenly something that half the population struggle with at the moment, becomes even harder.
In the fullness of time, people will start buying digital videos (like this Daewoo model which is possibly still the only one available), and even better, hard disk recorders with maybe integral DVD writers. But that’s a little way off – with supermarkets selling VCRs at less than £50, the VCR may be dead as a pre-recorded medium, but it’s alive if you just want to tape tomorrow night’s Eastenders.
In the meantime, a report last week from Informamedia (can’t find the report of their site) says that no countries, including Britain, will have been able to turn off analogue by 2010. In a Media Week article, one agency chief is quoted as saying “The Government’s ambitions on this subject are a pipe dream.”