lizclinton

Your joking right??? Since when has Australia ever been a leader in technology. We always follow along several years behind the real developed nations of the world. Just think how long it took to get colour TV or FM radio here.

Great news. Only one more year of putting up with watching the V8s on delay to get it in HD.

Worlds best EPG for the worlds worst picture quality.

Davmel I was also thinking of reducing the SD primary channels resolution down to something more like we currently see being used on the shopping channels. How much of an extra bandwidth gain would this give to add to the 4 Mbps from converting the current MPEG 2 HD channels to SD and would this give us enough to power a MPEG 4 HD primary channel?

Why not still offer the primary SD channels at a reduced PQ. Convert Mate, Gem & One to SD and with the extra bandwidth gained from this launch a new 1920x1080 MPEG4 version of the primary channels as a premium product for the more discerning viewers. This way those with SD only boxes gain the current HD channels now converted to SD while those that want HD and are prepared to invest in MPEG4 gear will finally be able to watch the primary channels in great HD. I will be keen to read what the more learned members of this forum think the technical and regulatory issues of implementing this plan would be.

Yes the song "my city of Sydney" followed by what I'm guessing was an old station close animation from the 50's or 60's then the picture reducing to a dot of light in the centre of the screen like how some old CRT TV's used to turn off then TX off. Well done ATN7 it was a nice touch.

No offence taken timj. I just wanted you know that not all old people are HD clueless. It's a condition that afflicts both young and old and boy aren't our FTA stations lucky that it does or they would have even less viewers than they already have.

I'm currently in Auckland and they turned off their analogue service this morning. The one big reason for a change to digital here was the huge improvement in PQ. What improvements could the TV stations use to sell digital to us?? Maybe those six exciting new shopping channels we have all deleted from our channel lists.

Hey take it easy I'm one old person who is a real HD nazi so don't write us all off as clueless.

Its a pity that they dont put as much effort into fixing DABs pathetic signal coverage and sound quality issues as they do spinning the latest sales figures.

Thanks for the reading Alan, Its encouraging to see so much talk about MPEG4 by our broadcasters even though their excitement about the numbers of compatible receivers in the market is a little over the top I think. The TV4ME debacle of last year I believe bears witness to the fact that there is still quite a large installed base of MPEG2 only receiving gear out there and Sony by their own admission have said that they have only been selling MPEG4 receiver’s here since 2009. I must say the idea of an MPEG4 program stream incorporated into the current transport streams of each of the broadcasters sounds like and interesting idea but I understand this will cause problems with some receivers currently in service though the numbers of these I’m not that sure of. I totally agree that a spare channel must be allocated to allow the introduction of DVB T2 at some point in the future but with such a regressive federal government now in power I would expect any spare spectrum to be flogged off quickly in the name of budget imperatives with absolutely no thought to the future just like what is being done to the NBN today.

As I'm sure it has been pointed out to you before Alan the vast majority of DTV receiving equipment in Australia is not compatible with MPEG 4 encoding so it would cause no end of problems if broadcasters were to change. As I see it we only have two options to get our FTA up to the standard enjoyed overseas. 1 Reduce the number of stupid multichannels to properly resource the current MPEG 2 HD channels and then make each of them the primary channel. 2 Find a spare channel and make this a DVB T2 channel with MPEG 4 encoding so as to only be available to those who have digital gear purchased in the last couple of years. Having said all that I really wonder if the people running FTA in this country have any interest in HD at all.

Would have hoped that any free spectrum would have been allocated to some form of advanced TV standards like DVB T2. But looks like any chance of our TV dragging itself into the 21st century is hopeless.

Maybe if they switch back to black & white they could fit another shopping channel or two in.

Why do you need the internet when everything you will ever need to know can be found by listening to 2GB or reading the Telegraph??

Wow we now get to see two meatheads beat one another senseless in HD. Couldn’t they have been more innovative and had a HD shopping channel instead?

It may make way for the new BBC HD channel.

Sorry double post

You can bet they just sold out the fans and took the dollars and ran.

The future is most definitely radio via the mobile phone service. I use the tunein app on my phone connected to the cars stereo via Bluetooth almost exclusively now for all my in car radio listening and am more than happy with the reliability and sound quality on our crowded 3G networks. It’s a sure thing that digital radio will fail because of the very poor audio quality and its even worse signal coverage.

Yes that was my experience years ago where channels 7,9A,10 & 11 were rock solid while 8 was quite flaky.

Are SBS on 9A having the same coverage problems as channel 8?

Thanks Ron. When I lived at Claremont some years ago we had problems with channel 8 even though we were line of sight to the mountain. There was some work done on the antenna back in those times and it did go a long way to fixing our issues. I wonder what work they have planned this time to address the problems?

Whats the story with the ABC on channel 8 then?

Thats if ONE HD even exists after the analogue shutdown.