Rolling U.K. DTV Switch-Over On Pace to Finish Under Budget

LONDON -- The U.K.’s digital TV switch-over is “on track” to finish on time in 2012, and about 55 million pounds under budget, said David Scott, CEO of Digital UK (DUK), which was set up to mastermind the rolling switch-over that began 2008 and will include the release of 14 UHF channels for government sale.

DUK wants to mark its fifth birthday by reminding DTV watchers of the enormity of the task of converting transmitters to digital without interrupting service, Scott said at a seminar last week. The U.K.’s analog terrestrial service covers 98.5 percent of the population and must be switched off in stages, Scott said. Meanwhile, the low-power digital transmitters serving 77.8 percent of the U.K. must be upgraded and moved to temporary frequencies, he said. Then the plan will deliver all-digital signals at high power to the bulk of the population when the transition is complete, while avoiding interference to and from transmitters in Continental Europe, sometimes only 20 miles away across clear water, he said.

The BBC is funding an 800 million pound consumer education campaign from the annual license fees that U.K. viewers must pay, Scott said. The campaign’s targeted at those most at risk of losing their signals, he said. Meanwhile, broadcasters are spending another 700 million pounds to upgrade their transmitters, he said. DUK’s research shows the campaign is working in the form of higher awareness about the transition, he said.

So far about 500 transmitter sites, serving 6.4 million homes (24 percent of the population) have been switched, mostly in terrains where more transmitters are needed, Scott said. Another 11 million homes in more urban areas will switch in 2011, he said. London will be one of the last to switch, in 2012 and in time for the Olympics, he said. London’s Crystal Palace site serves 4.5 million homes (20 percent of the population) from a 720-foot mast built in 1957. Like most masts, it must be strengthened to support the extra antennas needed for the tenfold power increase to digital.

Work that previously would have taken weeks of winching can now be done in a day using helicopters with contra-rotating blades for stable hovering that were originally built in Russia to hunt NATO submarines, Scott said. The craft are have crews trained to lower an antenna block onto a mast tip for manual bolting, he said. The Crystal Palace is being winched, though, because it’s feared the sight of helicopters hovering over the capital’s crowded roads might cause traffic accidents, he said.

"Fortunately we built plenty of leeway into the timetable, because the summers of 2007, 2008 and 2009 were amongst the wettest on record,” said Peter Heslop, a top executive at Arqiva, the private British company that runs most of the U.K.’s transmitters. “But there are some things we didn’t expect. Work on the mast at Skelmersdale in the North of England was held up when a local resident discovered that a Grasshopper warbler bird was nesting there. We had to stop all work until … the birds had flown.”