TV Guide of the Future

I've thought about the future of TV lately and I started wondering which channels would still exist in 20 years. So, this morning I looked at popularity polls and the news about BBC Four and decided to draw up my idea of what the TV guide would look like in 2040.

Here is what I came up with:



15 Main free-to-air channels. This does not include Satelite and IPTV Channels.


What Freeview channels do you think will still exist in 2040 and why???

I bet 5Star would be gone along with 5’s other sister channels by 2036, maybe BBC 4 would still work as an archive channel even in 20 years time. I could see E4 sticking around for the late 2020’s/2030’s too.

I was thinking about that. Channel 5 and 5Star are the most likely to fall of air based on the above list.

I reckon we’ll have had a terrestrial switch off by then. I would imagine there will be a couple of ‘wallpaper’ services for people to leave on in the background with news, soaps and big live events and event television. But I think everything will be delivered through IP.

You could probably also have personalised TV channels that autopopulate with your favourite shows. In much the same way as Spotify works for music.

Undoubtedly that will be the way forward. But I wonder how much the broadband infrastructure would need to be upgraded to expect everyone to receive their tv by IP?

Would the current infrastructure cope at all?

If that's supposed to be Freeview, the channel numbers should start at 1, not 101.

I think Alfie's not massively off the mark in that a PSB only future may well be the way to go.

TV really does need slimming down. Too much quantity than quality in my opinion.

What the ideal number of channels would be is more difficult to assertain.

I've actually been looking into this lately. The amount of channels varies widely from country to country. The largest areas of the United States seem to have even more than we do. Not quite so many channels per mux but many more of them. At the other end, you have some smaller European countries like Cyprus which have a single mux with all the available FTA stations on.

Japan is interesting in that most of the country gets only 7 channels, maybe 8 if they're lucky. All are on their own muxes without subchannels. Not sure why this is because I think the platform they use is capable of more than one channel per mux.

Other way around. If you want less channels, you want more quality than quantity.

It was a typo ffs. "Too much" ended up written as "more more".

I think there will still be a need for Television in the 2040s even if just for childrens and news programmes

Completely agree. It's was to cluttered in its current state and is becoming confusing.