Will UK viewers eventually catch up with US and Australia?

It would appear that the BBC are now considering the possibility of bringing HDTV to viewers in the United Kingdom of GB&NI.

According to an unsourced article at Digital Spy, <http://www.digitalspy.co.UK/article/ds14311.html>



TV's hi-definition vision of the future <http://news.bbc.co.UK/1/hi/technology/3403493.stm

So what exciting prospects are there, with the arrival of HDTV in the UKofGB&NI, for BBC station identifications and promotional videos, to take advantage of the vastly improved picture quality?

If only the original plan of re-engineering VHF 405 lines for HDTV was still plausible. HDTV sadly requires so much bandwidth that in the over crowded ether only Satellite or Cable seems to be the only distribution method unless there's an enormous upheaval of the frequency plan.

Its good news for the future health of British television. Like many, I'd assumed that HDTV was a no hope in the UK until MPEG4 decoders were available, and plasma panels dropped to a sub-£k1 price. I suppose though that both these mileposts would be likely to be within the BBC's timescale.

I wonder if the plan is transmit a separate MPEG2/4 HDTV stream, or would the possibility be explored of engineering an MPEG4 "helper" signal as an addition to a higher bitrate SDTV signal?

Rgds/

Maybe I'm being naive, but wouldn't it make more sense to improve the compression on digital TV first? The quality of DTT pictures is sometimes pretty poor.

No, that's not naive, its pretty spot on!

A poster on DS put a theory that there's a linear relationship between this new BBC direction, and the number of senior managers having purchased plasma displays in the last year.

Rgds/

Well of course they could use the remains of terrestrial once analogue is turned off.

Well if they introduced HDTV as a separate service requiring new reception hardware they'd also be able to use this as a way of using new compression systems. Windows Media 9 and MPEG4 both provide quite good quality HDTV at around 4-6Mbs - compared with the UK SDTV MPEG2 running at 3-5Mbs.

You could potentially split a DTT mux - putting out 2 SDTV and 1 HDTV channel - 2 using MPEG2 (and viewable on current Freeview kit) and 1 using MPEG4/WM9 that would only be receivable using new kit.

Alternatively you could create new muxes once analogue has switched off, and fill these with HDTV channels. The US currently run at around 16-18Mbs for their HDTV MPEG2 services, Australia slightly less (as they run at 1440 rather than 1920 samples horizontally at 1080 vertically?)

You would ideally use the launch of HD to deploy newer, more efficient encoding, replacing MPEG2 (which is getting on for 10 years old now)

It also ties in with the BBC moving to HDTV production increasingly - especially for co-productions with the US. I think we are close to where all BBC non-soap (and even some soap) will be shot on HDTV or film, though as with widescreen, I bet Eastenders is the last to change...

The Beeb has HDTV post-production kit in London and Bristol, and increasingly trails, title sequences etc. are being shot on HD (rather than film)

According to someone in the Home & Away thread, Holby City is already in HD at 1080i/50. Not that we'll notice the difference, but I guess it's preparing for the future.

I don't know, EastEnders was relitivly early broadcasting in 16:9 from September 1999 where Emmerdale & Corrie were still 4:3 until Jan 2002.

Yep - but it was late in comparison to other BBC drama. ITV were much slower moving to 16:9 production - for a while Emmerdale and Trisha were shown 14:9 pillarbox in some regions...

I posted about the Holby stuff - not sure if it was an experiment or a full-move to 1080/50i. (A recent episode of Blue Peter was also shot in 1080/50i)

Historically the Beeb has made quite a lot of HD stuff - the first mainstream series was "The Ginger Tree" a BBC/NHK series shot and edited HD for the Japanese in the late 80s. It was converted to PAL via a slightly nasty route (1035/60i to 480/60i to 576/50i - it would have looked better in the UK if it could have gone straight to 576/50i or via 576/60i) and used early tubed HD cameras.

Quite a few operas and ballets have been covered in HD (often to improve the quality of DVD and previously laser disc releases, and archival reasons), and Centre Court and/or Court Number 1 were covered in HDTV quite a lot in the early 90s - in at least one case using both the 1250/50i European and the 1125/60i (1035/1050/60i) Japanese systems to cover the same match, as well as the PAL 576/50i standard used for the main BBC One/Two coverage.

The LA Olympics in 1984 (1125/60i)had some HD coverage, as did the 1992 Barcelona and Albertville Summer and Winter Olympics(1250/50i) which had quite comprehensive coverage - though none of the SuperSloMo or Radio camera innovations that were introduced by this time.

More recently the last night of the Proms and the Carols from Kings have both been HDTV off-and-on for a couple of years (1080/50i or 1080/60i), Rockface was shot 1080/25p.

I know Brookside moved to 16:9/4:3 switchable DigiBeta in the mid-90s - did they actually shoot and edit in 16:9 when they were broadcasting 4:3 full-frame, or just experiment until the switch and shoot with the kit in 4:3 mode?