Freeview digital to switch off eventually?

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geek3001

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#3516300 3-Aug-2026 10:58

alasta:

My elderly parents will never transition to streaming, simply because they refuse to use anything that they don't understand. The question is, how long will it take for that demographic to decline to the point where it is no longer justifiable for Sky to pay terrestrial broadcasting fees to Kordia?

This is something that not everyone realises, especially younger folk.

Many of the oldies simply don't have the ability to absorb all the new fangled stuff and just want things left as is. Why do I need to change is a question I have had to deal with.

I knew a gent many years ago who hated new TVs with plastic cabinets. When his old wooden cabinet TV finally died, he had the innards of that TV removed and bought a new TV that fit inside the wooden cabinet.

I'm also aware of folk who only watch TV1, who are not interested in other channels and who became totally confused in 2013 with the analog switch off when they had to use Freeview. Their digital set top boxes have had to be set up to stay on TV1 and woe betide if TV1 is not on their TV screen when they turn on their telly.

Folk like this will have no TV to watch when digital broadcasting ends if they cannot accept the change to streaming.

zaptor

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#3516313 3-Aug-2026 11:52

geek3001:

alasta:

My elderly parents will never transition to streaming, simply because they refuse to use anything that they don't understand ...

This is something that not everyone realises, especially younger folk ...

I wonder if it's also a case of the older ones being privileged to have lived in a time when tech just worked.

Crapification is just the way things are these days. In decades gone by, people tended to solve problems by using a more engineering-centric or pragmatic approach.

A lot of those older folks are the ones who built the back-bone of what is taken for granted today - some would say really old "legacy" tech, but it just works. A lot of folks (not only oldies), just want their stuff to work, and badly tested (if ever tested at all) upgrade/patch/feature deployments that break things tend to annoy people.

Unfortunately, modern tech seems to revolve around being good at shaping a narrative, and convincing folks the new stuff is so much better - DVB-I over DVB-T/DVB-S in this context.

snj

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#3516379 3-Aug-2026 12:17

geek3001:

alasta:

My elderly parents will never transition to streaming, simply because they refuse to use anything that they don't understand. The question is, how long will it take for that demographic to decline to the point where it is no longer justifiable for Sky to pay terrestrial broadcasting fees to Kordia?

This is something that not everyone realises, especially younger folk.

Many of the oldies simply don't have the ability to absorb all the new fangled stuff and just want things left as is. Why do I need to change is a question I have had to deal with.

I knew a gent many years ago who hated new TVs with plastic cabinets. When his old wooden cabinet TV finally died, he had the innards of that TV removed and bought a new TV that fit inside the wooden cabinet.

I'm also aware of folk who only watch TV1, who are not interested in other channels and who became totally confused in 2013 with the analog switch off when they had to use Freeview. Their digital set top boxes have had to be set up to stay on TV1 and woe betide if TV1 is not on their TV screen when they turn on their telly.

Folk like this will have no TV to watch when digital broadcasting ends if they cannot accept the change to streaming.

Amen.

Couldn't teach my now late Uncle many new tricks. Managed to get him to adopt using an iPad + Facetime early on enough that wasn't too bad.

But changing anything in the last few years was a big no-no.

As far as TV went, he adopted Sky fairly early, but he clung onto his old black Pace/MySky box and I fear his reaction if he needed to switch to one of the newer ones with the different remotes/etc. (In a freaky coincidence... in the period that his TV/etc was switched off at the wall while he was in hospital/etc... the Sky box died at the same time).

We struggled to get him to agree to updating his computer until a month or two before he passed, even though his old one was well past it's lifetime, but of course the changes in Windows apps in that timeframe confused him greatly.

alasta

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#3516383 3-Aug-2026 12:30

geek3001:

I'm also aware of folk who only watch TV1, who are not interested in other channels and who became totally confused in 2013 with the analog switch off when they had to use Freeview. Their digital set top boxes have had to be set up to stay on TV1 and woe betide if TV1 is not on their TV screen when they turn on their telly.

Ah yes, the long term (or even medium term) viability of TVNZ might be an even bigger problem for older people than the move away from DVB-T. My mother doesn't want to see anyone other than Judy Bailey and Richard Long, otherwise there is "something wrong with the TV".

If the government eventually shuts down TVNZ then hopefully they will run it as a public service broadcaster for a few hours a day as a transitional solution for older people.

geek3001

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#3516387 3-Aug-2026 12:41

There is also the question of what place does a linear TV broadcaster have these days.

By that I mean, as time goes on, how many people will really want to wait until hh:mm on ddd day to watch the next installment of their favourite program.

Even the evening news bulletin is arguably of dwindling value now, perhaps only for those people that don't or can't keep an eye on news websites during the day. Mid-day and late evening news bulletins have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

Most people today will watch stuff on streaming media / video on demand or whatever it may be called, multiple episodes at a time over several hours. They are not interested in one episode per week and are not interested in ads either.

Freeview / DVB-I or whatever it will be called will need to properly cater for that binge-watching evolution or it may be of little value.

richms

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#3516444 3-Aug-2026 13:03

IMO the falling of MTV was just the first of many that this will happen to. There will always be people that want to turn something on for background noise which is what most of the chaff on the other non main channels is used for, and that can be catered for by other services easily. Otherwise people are watching shows when they appear on the ondemand service. The first run of an episode on linear is meaningless now.

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alasta

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#3516558 3-Aug-2026 14:23

geek3001:

There is also the question of what place does a linear TV broadcaster have these days.

By that I mean, as time goes on, how many people will really want to wait until hh:mm on ddd day to watch the next installment of their favourite program.

I think the bigger issue is the commercial model that linear broadcasting is dependent on. There is no way to paywall DVB-S/T, and the free-to-air model has been fundamentally broken by Google and Meta hoovering up the lion's share of advertising revenue. Mediaworks, and subsequently WBD, failed at making free-to-air TV profitable and there is no reason to believe that Sky is going to do any better.

There is no point in having a free-to-air TV distribution platform if it's not commercially realistic to source content for it.

RustyViewer

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#3516562 3-Aug-2026 14:52

The outrageous amount that was being charged by Kordia to local stations such as Canterbury TV pushed them off the air. They were charging the same amount as national channels and not taking into account broadcast reach. As of 2016 it was $880,000 per yea per channel.

It now occurs to me that they could come back as a streaming service which I understand would cost pittance by comparison.

richms

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#3516565 3-Aug-2026 15:04

RustyViewer:

The outrageous amount that was being charged by Kordia to local stations such as Canterbury TV pushed them off the air. They were charging the same amount as national channels and not taking into account broadcast reach. As of 2016 it was $880,000 per yea per channel.

It now occurs to me that they could come back as a streaming service which I understand would cost pittance by comparison.

The problem is that those bit sites on the hills have a real cost to maintaining and running them. With DVB allowing for multiple transmitters on channel doing the same thing, it really is more suited to smaller infill transmitters - along the lines of what telcos have installed for mobile networks. But that ship has sailed, we are stuck with large sites on the outskirts of town blasting signal over the top of most people who cant get anything without an external antenna and forget those in valleys etc.

I wonder if DVB-T from LEO would ever work out as a thing?

Richard rich.ms

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#3516730 3-Aug-2026 17:35

RustyViewer:

The outrageous amount that was being charged by Kordia to local stations such as Canterbury TV pushed them off the air. They were charging the same amount as national channels and not taking into account broadcast reach. As of 2016 it was $880,000 per yea per channel.

It now occurs to me that they could come back as a streaming service which I understand would cost pittance by comparison.

I'd actually intended on bringing this up too, because that's happening in Australia where FTA is slightly more successful (population, sports broadcasting legislation, local content requirements all likely influences). Just the other month there was a case of the Channel 10 set of channels almost going dark in one of the regions due to rebroadcasting agreements failing to renew. Finding the article again it looks like a short term renewal was done, but from memory there have been examples of other FTA channels going dark for periods. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-29/channel-10-win-television-riverland-mount-gambier-griffith/106856046

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