The city of London on Wednesday will start the final...
The city of London on Wednesday will start the final retuning process for its phase of the U.K.’s DTV switchover (DSO). The process ends April 18, when 12 million viewers in 4.8 million London-area homes will have been converted to…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
all-digital, with any bugs ironed out, well ahead of the London Olympic games, which open July 27 for a two-week run. The April 18 landmark switchover will be celebrated with a 200,000-watt light show at the 219-meter-tall Crystal Palace transmitter site run by network operator Arqiva. The five-year, $1 billion DSO plan will be halted briefly for the Olympics, then resumes in August before finishing in October with Northern Ireland and the last of the U.K.’s 1,154 transmitter sites being converted. At that point, 98.5 percent of the U.K. population will be able to receive digital TV with some HD channels, using new DVD-T2 modulation and MPEG-4 coding. HD has until now been available only in selected areas. The staggered DSO plan, unique in all the world, is necessary because the U.K. has been running parallel analog and digital services for 70 percent of the country since 1998. Once complete, the DSO plan will give the U.K. government what has been called a “digital dividend” of 16 UHF channels to sell off, probably for mobile broadband. After the DSO plan is complete, some 5,000 analog amplifiers will be junked, but recycled for their raw material content, with only 1 percent destined for landfill, authorities have said.