TV in London. 26 November 2018 at 7:41PM in TV MoneySaving 13 replies 1.4K views

Mr_Singleton

Watched a bit of the 6pm news on BBC 1. It then went to the local London news.

Thing is it said as it always does a message to the effect of ‘We can’t show local news in HD please re-tune to channel X’

Why can’t the BBC in London not show local news in HD and when will it be able to?
Thanks.

Neil_Jones

Because BBC One HD is a national service, not a London one.

The local news in HD is not just a case of flicking a switch, it requires investment in new hardware, software and uplink charges to the satellite. It will cost money the BBC doesn't have at the moment.

Carrot007

Neil_Jones wrote: »

Because BBC One HD is a national service, not a London one.

Depends how they were watching it.


On freeview I would expect it to work just fine as no additional spending is required. However I have nopt watched the low quality streams of freeview in yearsd (and the bbc's are probably the best on there).


Online, again I assume it would just work.


On Satellite. Then yes, they would need a channel for each area and thus need to pay a lot more. Same for cable.

Mr_Singleton

Neil_Jones wrote: »

Because BBC One HD is a national service, not a London one.

That makes sense thanks.

Is there a timeline for getting local stations onto HD?

Mr_Singleton

Carrot007 wrote: »

Depends how they were watching it.

FreeView Play I believe.

Would be good regardless of SD/HD if you didn’t have to change channels.

Bigphil1474

OP, it's same in Yorkshire. Local news is only on BBC1 SD channel.

onomatopoeia99

The BBC would need all the local channels broadcasting in HD, which at present they don't. Currently only the programming that is the same across all local instances of BBC1 is broadcast on BBC1 HD, when you want regional programming you have to switch to whichever local SD BBC1 variant you live in.

To implement it the BBC would have to buy a lot of extra bandwidth both on Astra 28E and on the Freeview network. Can't see the point really, I don't care if my local news is SD or HD.

lammy82

It's a shame they haven't managed to come up with any sort of workaround using the interactive services features, even if it just meant treating the viewer to a quarter-screen SD feed of the local news for whichever region they select. That would surely make more sense than 15 minutes of birdsong or whatever.

[Deleted User]

lammy82 wrote: »

It's a shame they haven't managed to come up with any sort of workaround using the interactive services features, even if it just meant treating the viewer to a quarter-screen SD feed of the local news for whichever region they select. That would surely make more sense than 15 minutes of birdsong or whatever.

As opposed to just switching channels?

lammy82

Colin_Maybe wrote: »

As opposed to just switching channels?

Yup! It's not professional for a broadcast channel to have 15 minutes of downtime, in the middle of prime time, asking the viewer to change the channel to continue watching, just because of a technical shortcoming.

[Deleted User]

lammy82 wrote: »

Yup! It's not professional for a broadcast channel to have 15 minutes of downtime, in the middle of prime time, asking the viewer to change the channel to continue watching, just because of a technical shortcoming.

It's not a technical shortcoming, it's a money shortcoming. See post #7