Quote:
Originally Posted by OLD BOY
I must admit to being puzzled by this. Surely, if the powers that be want Freeview to continue, they could simply transfer it all over to the internet.
Other streamers such as the BBC I-Player and NOW already have their scheduled TV channels on their internet service, so why is there an issue with bringing them all together on a streaming version of Freeview? Is there something I’m missing here?
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And for an encore, Old Boy solves world hunger by telling governments all they have to do is grow more food and ship it around the world.
As per, you seem to think that describing your desired output is basically the same as solving all the technical challenges required to achieve it. In the real world, streaming is proprietary technology, there are therefore significant costs to entry for smaller operators and at present there is no system that would facilitate seamless transition from the present system of using channel numbers to access broadcast transmissions. In other words, while the building blocks may be there, someone has got to spend a lot of time and money assembling them into an IP version of Freeview before such a transition could be made.
We’ve been in a new house for almost a year now and have had so much else to do, we’ve yet to get round to getting an aerial on the roof. We have FTTP so we do indeed rely on streaming for all our TV. However even with a TV that is only 5 years old, and fibre internet delivering 300Mbps, streaming broadcast channels is still clunky. Select the broadcaster’s app, wait for it to load, navigate away from the default view (which is always what they want to push, and never what’s on now), then navigate from channel to channel to see what’s on.
If you’re lucky you’ll get a now-and-next EPG for the channel you’re actually looking at. There is no EPG for the entire broadcast stream ecosystem. I still have to use the Freesat app on my iPad in order to see what’s on all the channels before opening an app, because navigating channels within an app is quite slow enough - navigating between channels on different apps is torturous.
We are a very long way from replicating Freeview over IP in any way that would make it easy to achieve universal adoption.