Britain is beginning the first phase of its switch-off of analog television broadcasting on Wednesday, with residents in Whitehaven the first to go all digital.
Television viewers in the town, which is in the northwestern corner of the country, who do not have digital services such as Freeview or Sky will lose BBC2 when the switch-off begins.
Digital UK, the body overseeing the switch-off, said town residents are leaving things until the last minute. About 20 per cent of households, or 5,000, have not yet purchased the digital set-top box needed for the conversion. Britain will then continue a phased switch-off, resulting in the entire country going completely digital by 2012. Britain is the latest country to begin an analog switch-off, after Finland completed it in August. The United States is scheduled to turn off its signals in 2009, with Canada following suit on Aug. 31, 2011.
In Canada, the switch-off will only apply to free, over-the-air broadcasts and not necessarily to cable television subscribers. Under rules set by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, cable companies have the option of turning off analog signals if they can show more than 85 per cent of their customers are on digital. Canada's largest cable provider, Rogers Communications Inc., now has more than 50 per cent of customers on digital and is expected to surpass that threshold in three to four years.
I think that governments around the world are turning off analog broadcasts because digital is a more efficient use of the broadcast airwaves, where several digital channels can use the same transmission space as one analog channel.
Television providers also support the move because digital television creates additional revenue through the addition of on-demand services such as pay-per-view movies.
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