Swedish Digital Terrestial TV already old?

In an article in IDG one can see some information about the terrestial TV we use in Sweden already be ready to be replaced. The article talk about 2015 as the year when all boxes (3 million of them according to SvT) have to be replaced. Several people have reacted on this stating “what is the bad thing with that, 2015 I will have replaced my box anyway”. That show that the PR/Marketing has succeeded. In reality, the problem is something completely different.

Once upon a time, lobbyists (from Terracom and SVT I think) managed to get not only DVB-T accepted as the new digital TV in Sweden. They also choose MPEG-2 standard for encoding and 760p as the format for what they called high definition TV. In USA, South Korea and other countries they went for 1080p instead. And what we do see today, well, 1080p is what is used for high definition in cable networks and satellite. Specifically 1080p/25 and 1080p/50 is what is aimed for. This imply what we have in Sweden is already old. The people that managed to make all people in Sweden buy a box now have to tell people we have to change boxes again. And not only that, that they have to transmit both old encoding and new encoding in parallell for a while. Until 2015 they say themselves. But why?

In reality the pieces in the puzzle all fall in their places now. Lets go through the arguments one by one:

  1. Sweden is as one of the first countries in the world to choose what to use the frequencies used for analog terrestrial TV for. TV people of course want to use it for TV while others try to push for more neutral usage, or in reality, for IP packets that in turn can be used for anything.

  2. TV people is pushing arguments in all different directions that claim the frequencies can not be used for data. Only for TV.

  3. To transmit both MPEG-2 encoded channels and MPEG-4 encoded channels, of course more frequency spectrum is needed than if only one of the encodings are needed. The longer the overlap between the two encodings, the longer time more spectrum is needed. SVT themselves together with Terracom of course want this to be until 2015.

  4. Swedish Government is shortly to decide about how to divide the frequencies. Of course there is interest from TV people to (at this point in time) push their interests forward. And this last push of information (that they need the frequencies until 2015) is coming at with perfect timing.

  5. Given the situation above, if the politicians say “no, you do not get more frequencies”, the TV people only have two choices: decrease the number of channels in the DVB-T network during the change to MPEG-4 coding or skip changing encoding all together.

  6. If they get frequencies during a short period of time (say until Dec 31 2008) for the change to MPEG-4, then of course TV people will claim it is the government that force people to buy new boxes, and not themselves. When in reality they made the wrong choice of technologies to start with.

3 million boxes (which I think is a low number), 300SEK each is 900 million SEK. This number is to be compared with the 756 million (extra) used to get Tetra/Rakel up and running and the 75 million (!) which was the only the government could find to help buildout of fiber all over Sweden.

This is not information about the need to change boxes before 2015. This is SvT and Terracom telling the government they need all frequencies used earlier in analog tv until 2015 or else the government have to pay. Pay for the bad technological choices made by SvT and Terracom themselves.

My choice would be to tell SvT and Terracom that they can get some frequencies extra until Dec 31 2008 (when new technologies for IP transport technically is developed), but from that date, they have to use whatever frequencies they have. This implies they have to choose between HD-TV or large number of channels. This should not be something the government should choose.

The real question should be whether we should have so many channels and/or HD-TV in the terrestial network? People that want those features, can they not get a satellite access, cable-tv or distribution over Internet? That way we do not have to change from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4.

Or as EU Telecoms and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding says in the first documents about review of the electronic communications directive: If the choice is between the 300th TV channel and a new wireless broadband service, I want that Member States decide in the interest of the citizen. In the old days the government (or in reality SvT and Terracom) could choose what, when and how people watched television. Today the viewer is choosing when, how and what to watch. Not everyone understand this shift. Similar problems I see with SR.