[Gllug] M$ looks at ITV digital

[Simon Stewart]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 07:57:51AM +0100, Chris Bell wrote:
> Hello,
>    According to BBC news this morning, M$ have asked for more details about
> ITV digital, and may be interested... 

So yet another low quality service that doesn't work as expected and
completely lacking promised advances from MS? Makes sense....

*grr* Digital TV is such a wasted opportunity. First the government
flog off part of the bandwidth allocated to it Channel 5, thus making
the new terrestrial digital channels harder to recieve and crunching
the amount of bandwidth available. Then it goes and does a digital
radio and rather than offering a smaller number of high quality
channels, it pushes out dozens of channels, each compressed so much
picture quality suffers (hell, even I notice it, and that's saying
something) and each showing endless repeats of TV programmes you never
watched, sport you don't care about or cartoons so inane only
vegetables watch them[1]. Then it screws up its finances by attempting
to get football rights so it can compete with Sky, when the one of the
few channels worth watching on the thing is Sky One in the first
place[2]

To cap it all, although they've gone to widescreen, they completely
missed the boat for doing HDTV. With the amount of processing power
that's available now-a-days, they could have done this, and _still_
got the thing to work with normal TV sets (which everyone's going to
have to replace anyway, because in 2010 the government plan to shut
down the analogue services)

Yet another golden tech chance wasted.

Don't get me started, just don't get me started on how this country's
getting the transition to digital TV and radio so horribly wrong.

Cheers,

Simon

[1] Except for <insert your favourite program from Cartoon Network
    here>. See! You don't need dozens of channels showing this, just
    one will do.

[2] Enterprise, but that's now on one of the analogue channels.

-- 
Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
                -- Sam Goldwyn

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