Hi Bert, I was going to resply to Jeroen's post weren't that my pc crashed and after rebooting most of the mail from the past few days no longer appeared in the OE Inbox indexes (yes they have been in need of reconstruction for a while now;-)). Anyway. Yes they cut of the analog signal, unfortunately. So let's welcome the continously present noise. Thank god they got rid of the ubiquitous mosquito noise a few months ago, but this was more than compensated by other forms of noise. And even somewhat acceptable channels (public broadcasters for instance) had to give way to noise. Some-one asked about HD well, they can't even provide SD, so forget about HD. One of the Digitenne chief tech/operations guys told me this summer at an HD get-to-gether that there would be no HD on Digitenne. The Harmonic/Simac Broadcast release regarding the new head-end, that followed mentioned about the AVC capabilities of the encoders allowing for new services and HD, but sofar it makes more sense for them to add premium football channels as they did recently (dumping ZDF, that had replaced ARD which was completely blacked-out during the Worldcup period this summer, which had replaced Natgeo, BTW, the premium Canal Plus channels were also dumped just befor the worldcup, which allowed them to use 10 Mbit/s on the widescreen version of Nederland 2 showing, matches)) or keep on friendly terms with Mr. De Mol, by dumping a popular channel for his new 0909 premium phonelines and re-runs. As you can see from the long list above, bits come at a premium and they already have to scramble for space to put channels on air. Another major quality degradation! Sound level out of the stb that's perhaps 6 Db (no way to quantify properly) less than from the analog service (still the standard in my opinion), so a serious need to turn up the tv's volume, creating distortion and resulting in poorer dynamic range (needing a volumelevel that gives one head-aches to make some sense of what's said and presented). As for Eindhoven, Jeroen your city was indeed one of the places reported have absolutely no coverage, as judged by the one multiplex carrying the public broadcasters and oddly enough CNN International, the full service isn't even on the air yet in most of the country. BTW, there were also pre-war broadcasts so Philip's Experimental Television in 1948 weren't the country's first transmissions. Yes Bert, all of the Digitenne/KPN-TV offering was a pay-service, including the public broadcasters who have their own license for one of the five multiplexes, although Nederland 2 was unscrambled. The original plans were for this to remain the case people being forced to buy more expensive boxes (conax cass) and a smartcard from KPN. Parliament nixed this set-up and sent the cabinet back to KPN to renegociate, reducing the budgetted savings, by an if I am not mistaken undisclosed/not made explicit figure. So who would pay for the DVB-T distribution? The broadcasters? They were glad to be start paying less to the cable-co's for cariage. Cable fees have at least (depends on when you start comparing) quadrupled in the past number of years, only partly because of the shift in operators reveue sources from broadcasters to subscribers. You probably missed the stirr a week or two about the internal government document that calculated that cable fees would have to grow fivefold to 83 euro's for the equity company's to make a return on their investments. Anyway let's leave that aside, as the point is that broadcasters no longer need the (potential) thread of DVB-T to keep their cable distribution cost under control, so why would they start paying more to KPN, just to shift their universal coverage from cable to DVB-T. As for DVB-S pricing the figures Jeroen mentioned are way under the actual charges, as you have to add, the smartcard (well over 100 bucks, did some-one yell rip-off;-)), the activation fee, the premium phoneline costs (yes they publicly admitted years ago they keep people on hold to recuperate costs), a service fee, and nowadays even a termination fee, all for just a handfull of channels. Anyway I wished we still had the analog picture and sound quality and could have kept it for a few more years. BTW, you know they gave up on the ideal of universal indoor coverage, yup they want Mr. Yagi's legacy to return;-). d. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 1:17 AM Subject: [opendtv] Netherlands switches off analogue TV This was reported by Jeroen Stessen already. It says here that over the freed-up spectrum previously used by PAL TV, only some public service broadcasts are carried free, and that the rest is pay TV that competes with cable. I suppose that does not imply that the DTT previously on the air had to be all pay-TV, but from what Jeroen said before, that's mostly the case. Under these circumstances, it seems easy to understand why 95 percent of viewers subscribe to cable. Even more than in Germany before analog shutoff. Maybe KPN should try to offer FOTA TV in its terrestrial system. That might be successful enough to retain use of that spectrum beyond 2017. Seemed to work in the UK, and it also seems to have boosted OTA viewership in Germany. (And maybe here too, as we discussed last week.) Bert ---------------------------------------- http://www.dtg.org.uk/news/news.php?class=countries&subclass=0&id=2120 Netherlands switches off analogue TV Champagne corks were popping in Amsterdam last night as Dutch telco KPN switched off analogue television transmitters in the Netherlands, making it the first country to fully liberate the analogue TV spectrum for new digital services. Though the switch is a landmark in the global transition to digital-only broadcasting, few households in the country will have noticed: only 74,000 homes relied exclusively on analogue TV in a nation in which cable serves TV to 95% of the population. KPN has a licence to use the liberated spectrum for digital TV broadcasts until 2017. Under its licence it has had to invest in a new digital terrestrial broadcasting infrastructure, and must carry public service broadcast channels free of charge in return for access to the rest of the spectrum, which is being used to offer pay-TV channels that compete with cable. KPN switched off analogue transmitters shortly after midnight. "Then we broke out the champagne," said a KPN spokesman. Though analogue TV signals are being switched off, the move does not mean the Netherlands is fully digital: much of the country's cable TV is still delivered via analogue cable networks. Lovelace Consulting 12.12.2006 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.