You may have noticed the deeply patronising new television ads telling us all about “digital switchover” (DSO), the move from traditional analogue television to digital, all scheduled to take place on a region-by-region basis between 2008 and 2012. If recent surveys are right, however, many viewers won’t have a clue what “DigitAl”, the too-cute character voiced by Little Britain’s Matt Lucas, is banging on about.
The consumer research organisation Which? recently found that four in 10 UK television viewers were still completely ignorant about DSO, and half didn’t realise each set in the home will need to be converted separately. We’re talking about television, for heaven’s sake, our national pastime, and this level of ignorance is surprising. Digital broadcasts promise greater channel choice and improved sound and vision. Don’t they know that with a spanking new personal video recorder (PVR), they can kiss goodbye to the universal gripe about not being able to set the VCR? Bliss it will be, once they’ve tasted its delights.
Well, maybe. What a Doors straw poll has revealed among friends and colleagues is a staggering level of fear and loathing about going digital, not to mention degrees of irritation among those who’ve already done so.
This comment, about the sheer complexity of switching, is typical: “A neighbour gave me a Freeview box and I’ve been meaning to plug it in to my flatscreen television, but I already have the video recorder plugged in. Then there’s the DVD, which took me ages to get to work because it meant retuning the TV and passing the signal through the video. So I already have three remote controls knocking around the room. Is it really worth the hassle of trying to plug in the Freeview box when — and here’s the killer — I may not be able to get a signal at all? I live in a part of the Meridian area where they say you can get digital broadcasts, but sometimes you can’t.”
Even those who have already switched to digital television find it perplexing. Steve McDowell, 38, a publisher from London, says: “I used to have cable, but got rid of NTL because I found it so unreliable. Now I have satellite and, whenever something goes wrong, I take one look at the spaghetti junction of wires behind my set and feel like weeping. You waste hours trying to fix it to avoid an engineer’s £100 call-out fee, and end up feeling like an idiot. By the time you get through to the helpline, you’ve got apoplexy. It shouldn’t have to be this hard, should it?” No, it shouldn’t. If you believe the propaganda emanating from Digital UK, the non-profit consortium responsible for the advertising campaign and generally herding us into the all-digital age, it isn’t. Its spokesman, Jon Steel, says: “Given that 70% of UK households already have digital television, it seems that switching isn’t proving difficult at all for the majority of people.”
The truths his figure hides are that some homes fail to receive the whole family of 30 Freeview channels, especially commercial channels, and that picture quality fluctuates and is subject to interference. Can it be that cheap set-top boxes (STBs) have soured people’s first experience of digital television? Is DSO proving less straightforward than it seems on paper? All you need is a means of receiving the signal — a rooftop aerial for free-to-air Freeview channels, or a subscription to a cable, satellite or broadband internet service — and a digital tuner to turn the signal into pictures. You don’t necessarily need a new television, and Freeview STBs are cheap as chips, starting at £30, the wise men assure us.
However, Doors believes that there’s a big reality gap between the rosy official picture and the experiences of people struggling to make the new kit work. Even the most basic setup — Freeview via rooftop aerial and STB — can cause headaches as you work through all the permutations to connect the box to your television, VCR, DVD player and/or PVR, often guided by manuals translated from Chinese into gobbledegook (Inverto’s PVR instructions are almost comic). The STB usually comes without coaxial cables, so you have to return to the shop once you’ ve twigged.
Bitter experience has taught Doors reviewers that a cheap STB or basic PVR brings fiddly remotes, temperamental software and pitifully designed on-screen electronic programme guides (EPGs), while many don’t deliver the promised digital radio stations. As with most purchases, you get what you pay for — more so with digital television.
You’d think that the mighty leap forward offered by the mystique of time-shifting would have fired people’s imaginations — foolproof, one-stop recording, pausing and rewinding live television, skipping ads. Time-shifting frees you from the broadcasters’ schedules and is one of the nonchalant miracles of digital technology, yet Ofcom estimates that only 1.5m homes have PVRs, the majority being Sky+ subscribers.
Many viewers are unaware that once analogue broadcasts are turned off, their existing video-cassette recorder will severely limit their recording options unless they have at least two additional digital tuners. In future, they must also learn the difference between saving for short- term viewing and storing (archiving) programmes with a DVD burner. Not to mention grasping the worth of a dumb screen (choose between LCD and plasma) that you can feed from new digital sources such as high-definition media.
Two-thirds of households have told Continental Research that they won’t have converted all their sets by their DSO deadline. One in six told Which? that they will never convert all their sets, one in 10 claimed they will give up television altogether, and an angry 60% said it was wrong to force people to switch at all.
This refusenik obduracy hints that a digital backlash is a real possibility, and Doors fears that the government, along with the broadcasting and retail industries, is being dangerously complacent. Many people still need help switching to digital and, as with the arrival of Channel 5, an army of qualified engineers may be needed to visit people’s homes and explain how everything works.
Steel said: “We are interested in linking up with voluntary organisations, such as the Scout movement and schools, to see if they could provide practical assistance. But these are early days.” Scouts traipsing through the nation’s living rooms? Such a British solution! No wonder the aerial industry is salivating at the prospect of DSO. As most homes contain two or three televisions, the conservative guess is that 40m sets have yet to be converted, and the Confederation of Aerial Industries (www.cai.org.uk) is banking on a windfall once the need for aerial upgrades becomes evident to viewers in problem areas.
