BBC should get off its backside

I HATE RUPERT MURDOCH. Not that that's a terribly-valid or even rational reason for refusing to sign up for Sky's digital TV service, but there you go. Instead, I signed up for digital terrestrial TV when it was launched as OnDigital. It wasn't easy.

The idea of DTT appealed to me - I'm a technology junkie and I liked the elegance of using my existing aerial rather than bolting a chuffing great dish to the side of my picturesque Cotswold cottage. But trying to get OnDigital to send me a free set top box proved to be a bit of a challenge - no one in our village had signed up for the service, and no survey had been carried out to establish how good reception would be. I suggested to the (helpful, but now unemployed) person at the call centre that they should send me the box and I'd tell them how I got on, so that when other people enquired, they'd be able to give them a definitive answer on reception quality. This wasn't company policy.

Eventually, I went into a high street retailer (who didn't have a clue either), gave them a false postcode and was given a set top box. It worked fine, but signal strength was a tad low thanks to the antique aerial. An upgrade to a high gain, wideband one (about £100) improved things by several orders of magnitude. Sure there was occasional picture breakup due to fridge and central heating switching on and off, but the picture and sound quality was infinitely better than boring old analogue.

Bad old days
The point I'm eventually getting to is that back in the bad old days of OnDigital, you were pretty much on your own. There was no one place you could go for advice. The BBC and the ITC had websites with links to places you could type in your postcode to see what channels you'd be likely to get, but all of these carried the caveat that the information given couldn't be guaranteed accurate.
Not much help, really.

Now, with the second coming of DTT this Autumn, the BBC will be broadcasting around 30 free to air channels. To improve quality, they're moving to lower compression and upping the broadcast power to give a stronger signal, more resilient to those annoying pops and clicks caused by badly-suppressed white goods. The downside of this is that fewer channels will fit in each of the six multiplexes (4-5, as opposed to 6-7 previously), but the service should be better quality overall.

But some things haven't changed. I've just moved house, only about ten miles down the road, but I'm now looking at a different transmitter. Where I could get all six multiplexes previously, I can now only receive three. The principal BBC one - usually the strongest signal - is too weak to see. But can I get any advice from the BBC or Crown Castle, the outfit that operates the transmitters?
Of course not.

I could upgrade the aerial, which might improve things, but if transmission power is about to be increased, it could be money down the drain. No one can tell me when, or even if, power will go up from my local transmitter, let alone by how much. So I'm still only getting half the channels I should be. The best advice I got from the BBC's reception advice techies was wait and see. Thanks lads.

Switch off
The BBC is reputedly spending more money on convincing people to move to digital TV ahead of the Government's 2010 planned switch off of analogue services than it has on any other marketing campaign in its history. It needs to convince punters that DTT is actually better (it is), but without any proper mechanism for finding out what kind of service you'll get, who's going to fork out £100 for a new set top box?

The BBC needs to do something about the complete lack of advice available on DTT. I'm pretty technical, and I feel as if I've been banging my head against the wall for years. What chance has my grey haired old granny got? µ

See also
UK set to try digital TV again.