Freeview HD will have five channels by 2013 and the fourth channel could be on air by late 2010.
Trials of the combined DVB-T2 and MPEG-4 transmission standard have revealed that it is up to 50 per cent more efficient than current DVB-T/MPEG-2 standards, instead of the 30 per cent improvement expected.
Greg Bensberg, principal adviser, broadcasting, at Ofcom said this will enable a fourth high definition TV channel to launch in some regions by the end of 2010.
If the technology advances as expected, there will be enough capacity for a fifth channel in 2013, Bensberg told the HD Masters 2009 conference.
The first three Freeview HD channels will launch in Granada at the end of this year, followed by London and four other UK locations in early 2010.
These will come from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, with Five HD arriving later and the final HD channel to be decided by a 'beauty contest' between broadcasters' proposals.
The 50% increase is theoretical and is based on using the minimum error correction. We do not really know yet how well DVB-T2 will work in practice. We can all remember that with DVB-T the BBC had to switch from 64 to 16-QAM.
Posted by Trevor Harris (127.0.0.1) on July 14, 2009 at 12:16 PM BST #
Remember MPEG-4 has lots of options, that cannot - yet - be used in a realtime environment.
Trevor Harris's comment needs a few words, too.
His comments about DVB-T2 is utterly wrong.
The BBC tests with a bit-rate of 36.1 Mbit/sec are (a little) MORE robust than the equivalent UK 64-QAM DVB-T mode. For difficult channels (NonLOS, 0dB echo) DVB-T2 is significantly more robust than DVB-T.
Posted by reslfj (127.0.0.1) on July 14, 2009 at 06:47 PM BST #