> Eeeps! So it's completely possible for the fancy new "digital channels" to 
> have far lower quality than the old analogue ones? o_O

Yup, if you work for budgetcrappyshoppingtvchannels.tv and you've just 
bought a chunk of bandwidth, do you broadcast 5 top quality channels, or 10 
pixellated ones? :-)

> By the way, I remember when Sky first starting doing digital TV. Some 
> people went on Watchdog complaining about the picture "pixellating" while 
> they're trying to watch it. Having played with various codecs, now I 
> understand what's happening. Every now and when I do see weird stuff 
> happen to my picture... Annoying, but not too bad.

Usually happens to me when it gets windy, the dish wobbles a bit and the 
picture "chops up", mind you I'm receiving the signal quite far away from 
where it's aimed at ;-)

> Hmm, I wonder... My gandparents live in an area where the analogue 
> reception is little more than coloured snow. You can kind of tell when you 
> see a person's head, because there's a large area of pinky snow. But it's 
> very hard to watch. And every time a bus goes past on the main road, the 
> picture vanishes for a second or two. I wonder if digital would work any 
> better? ;-)

The problem in the UK is that they can't wack up the power of the digital 
transmitters until analogue is turned off.  For example my mum's local 
transmitter, Rowridge, gives out 500 kW of analogue signal, but only 2.5 kW 
of digital signal.  Yet she still receives perfect digital pictures through 
the same aerial.  Imagine if 500 kW of DIGITAL signal was transmitted - you 
wouldn't need an aerial!

In fact, here in Germany in my previous apartment, I could just stick a 
small bit of wire in the aerial input and I would receive all digital TV 
channels perfectly :-)

> I wasn't aware that anybody actually broadcasts in HD at all yet. I was 

> any millage out of an HD TV. (Yet. I'm sure it'll change over time...)

There are two free HD channels via satellite (BBC HD and ITV HD, with more 
surely to come), if you have Sky there are loads of HD channels for films, 
sports etc but of course you need a subscription.

You can get a bluray player for 150 pounds, or just get a play station 3 and 
you get an uber amount of computing power too.

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