Seven, Free TV champion MP’s Australian content ‘prominence’ statement
Seven West Media welcomed the statement from the Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts, the Hon Paul Fletcher MP, following the first meeting of the Future of Broadcasting Working Group.
The Minister highlighted the importance of the issue of “prominence” of Australian content on smart TVs and other connected devices, which is a priority area of the Working Group.
All network channels should be in HD by now. The resistance from networks and the delays in setting up HD for all digital channels just shows their lack of competition against streaming giants like Netflix. It’s getting to the point where I refuse to watch anything that’s not HD.
HD Viewer – I don’t think its that simple. Each channel gets a 7MHz block of spectrum, capable of transmitting 23mbs. The maths simply doesn’t work to do all channels in HD, particularly not when you still have to cater for all the older generations of TVs that can’t do MPEG-4. So they are limited to what they can show in HD. But you’re spot on – it’s what consumers are starting to expect as the minimum. Which is why DVB-T2 is worth exploring as an upgrade path that would increase the 23 to 32 and open up HD and potentially even 4K with the right compression tech.