DIGITAL TV PROBLEMS FAR FROM OVER

Published in North Devon Journal on Thu 15th Oct 2009

Once we knew the south west would be one of the first regions where television signals would go through "digital switchover" alarm bells started to ring.

I conducted a constituency survey and raised issues peculiar to North Devon - largely on account of our hilly landscape - with ministers, broadcasters and Digital UK: the body set up to handle the switchover.

At a meeting with Digital UK in the Commons, I raised the question of people getting their picture off a relay rather than a main transmitter ending up with a smaller range of channels than everyone else.

They dismissed this, saying these were "just a few shopping channels nobody will care about," and suggested that once switchover was completed nationally it should be resolved.

Almost half of North Devon households are on relays, and now it turns out that they are denied access to mainstream programmes which they certainly care about, such as ITV3, ITV4, Film4, Yesterday and music channels TMF, 4Music and so on. And there seems little prospect now that this will in fact be remedied later.

After switchover in July, I ran another survey in my September newsletter to constituents, asking how it had gone. A much smaller number replied - roughly 250 - which suggested that feelings were not running high, and indeed over 80% of those responding were broadly satisfied, with fewer than 20% unhappy.

But all that has changed more recently. On 30 September a national reorganisation of Freeview aimed to ensure that Channel 5, as a public service broadcaster (PSB), could be guaranteed everywhere. Because purely commercial broadcasters all pay for their slots on Freeview, the PSB part had to give up the extra space to 5. This squeezed ITV's slots and they - bizarrely - chose to axe ITV3 and ITV4 while carrying on with ITV2+1.

To make matters even worse, viewers on our north coast are now losing their signal and instead getting - intermittently - a picture from Wales, sometimes in Welsh! This is because since 30 September, the frequencies used on the Ilfracombe relay are also being used by Carmel in South Wales: on higher power! The Bristol Channel tide varies the interference, jumbling horizontal and vertical bits of the picture. Set-top boxes which retune automatically are sent into a spin.

Now I am taking the battle to OFCOM and the Treasury, which plans to sell off more channels in the spectrum to the private sector, leaving too few channels to resolve the problems or to promote a technical solution (Single Frequency Network) which works well elsewhere.

Every player seems to blame each other for this mess - my aim is to bang heads together!