That would be a reason indeed, but it's fairly rare, IME, that a dish can't be sited somewhere - even at ground level - to get a view of the southern sky. There are some obvious exceptions to that such as in blocks of flats and so on, but these are usually fitted with a communal distribution system in the UK. There are also some areas where dishes on the building are banned for National Trust 'place of beauty' reasons or whatever, but if that is the case, it's likely that a bloody great piece of ironwork on the roof will be frowned upon, as well. Even where dishes are banned from sight, I've seen some good disguise jobs on the wall that have been painted, or dishes in the garden on patio mounts. I wouldn't think on balance, that there are any more 'difficult' satellite reception cases, than there are terrestrial.
To me, the right to receive signals over the public airways without government intrusion, taxation or monitoring is sacrosanct and one of the most important constituents of liberty and worthy of a robust defense. Has there never been a movement in your country to abolish such a draconian provision of governance?
To finance the BBC, just levy a tax and make legislators accountable to the populace, don't deprive people of what we take to be an inalienable right, the right to information in the public space. Don't deprive the poor, aging, ill, and disenfranchised of the ability to gather information, and be consoled in their solitude, by discourse and entertainment over the public airwaves.
That can be fixed. When I lived in Europe I had modified a 25fps TV set there to be able to also display 30fps. Most sync separator chips are "bilingual" so that was easy. A peek at the datasheet, done. Then I mounted a switch and, voila, I had a dual standard TV. This allowed watching video tapes bought at US National Parks etc. The VCR was already multi-standard.
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I don't know of any movement specifically of the purpose of removing the licence. As far as I know, there has always been a requirement to hold one type of licence or another, going right back to the inception of the BBC in its wireless only days. Also, as far as I know, the purpose has always been to finance at least in part, if not totally, the BBC.
What cracks me up, is that the BBC have, over the years, steadfastly refused to accept advertising in any shape or form, to generate additional revenue. However, they also have a huge fully commercial sales business in 'ancillaries' such as DVDs of their programming. This, they are very happy to self-advertise in the breaks betwen programmes. In my view, given that they won't accept external advertising, they should be made to pay to have their own goods advertised on commercial television stations.
In theory, the BBC is apolitical, but it is in truth staffed and run by government lackeys at the highest levels, which has a profound effect on the governments ability to interfere in the way it is run. As it is in effect the 'state' television service, with the best will in the world, there is no way that it can be truly independant of politics, and as successive governments swing left and right, we tend to see the good old Beeb doing the same to stay in favour.
And rightly so. There isn't enough advertising revenue to go round these days - hence the ITV companies being in real trouble. If the BBC were allowed to cream off some of this that would likely be the end of them. And you'd end up with the nonsense of having to pay up front for a service
*and* have those annoying ad breaks.
Considering the number of hours of TV most watch the licence is good value.
To single out it as some form of human rights issue or whatever is nonsense. Smokers have to pay tax on their cigarettes as do drinkers on their alcohol. Motorists just to own a car they may use infrequently.
You can certainly argue how that money is spent, though. Personally I think the BBC should stick with its core business.
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Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
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You're missing the point I was making, though. I don't have a problem with them refusing to accept advertising. I have no desire to see adverts for cornflakes or whatever on the BBC. But by the same token, I don't really want to see adverts for the collected DVD of Blakes Seven episodes 1 to
1000, either. I just think that it's a bit hypocritical of them to refuse external advertising, but be quite happy to advertise their own products for free.
It's not as big a problem as you would think. Here we have both commerical stations and a tax supported one, besides many pay ones. They show programs uninterrupted from start to finish, and the commerical stations add commercials, while the pay and tax ones show program trailers and so on.
BBC prime shows both trailers and shorts in the time.
The US practice of interrupting a program to show a commercial bothers me, but I have not seen anything like it since I have been here.
I don't know, I'd love to see all of the episodes of Blake's Seven, maybe they can show them on BBC prime. :-) Meanwhile I expect that the number one seller these days is Doctor Who. I once had a video tape collection of everything that had been shown on US television, but it was on Beta tapes. Lacking a working playback device, I gave my broken recorded and the tapes to someone who may actually use it, but since last we communicated, he had not.
Geoff.
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM
get the free channels? If I stop paying my Sky Digital subscription, I still get the free channels through the dish (the ones I'd get through an aerial either on digital or analog).
But Americans like big, or is that only Texas?
American sitcoms/etc) that your TV was as full of junk as ours. You lot invented the term "channel flipping" didn't you?
That doesn't happen here. The TV guide may be out of date, as I get it weekly and things change (mainly due to bloody football which should be on it's own channel!!) But the digital TV menu is always correct (on Sky Digital). I pick what I want to record the night before, by which time any changes are on the menu so I can see what's really on.
That's why I record everything. I watch things when I have the time, not when they're on. And I can skip adverts and pause.
I would have thought modern TVs would display either. Certianly projectors and video recorders accept both.
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American sitcoms/etc) that your TV was as full of junk as ours. You lot invented the term "channel flipping" didn't you?
Which is why I scan through the TV guide before I go to bed and record eveything of interest that's on the folowing day.
If I end up recording something I later find sux, I can always skip it.
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Multisystem TV sets are hard to find. In the US, they are next to impossible. Here in Israel they used to be quite common and people brought videos from the US, while the over the air system is PAL. Now since DVD players have an automatic up/down shift to 25 frame per second with PAL video encoding option, no one bothers.
HDTV is only available over DBS, and there is no digital TV. If there was it would be all 25 frames per second, although the video encoding is YBCr, not PAL or NTSC.
Projectors generaly are multi frequency anyway because of the nature of PC video, so to include 25 frames per second (50Hz) and 30 frames per second (60Hz) sync is not much of a problem. The question is if they accept composite/s video instead of RGB and if there is a decoder for NTSC or PAL encoding.
PAL encoding is fundimentaly the same as NTSC, except the color signal is inverted every other line (hence the name phase alternate line). The big difference is that the color signal was encoded on top of the video over the air as a 4.43 mHz phase encoded (FM) signal, while the NTSC was at 3.57 mHz.
This was more to do with the wider bandwidth a 50Hz signal requires than anything else.
In order to save money multisystem players in the 1980's were set up with NTSC 4.43 instead of NTSC 3.57. This is due to the fact that the color signal itself is stripped off of the video on VHS and BETA tape and was stuck back on at 3.57 mHz for NTSC and PAL. To save money, the color encoding was all done at 4.43 mHz, so that only one set of modulators was needed, one to add the color to the video and one to convert the baseband composite video and audio to an RF (antenna) signal.
They were popular in countries that had no NTSC over the air signals. In the 1980's I have VCR's and TV sets that would support both NTSC 3.57 and 4.43 and VCR's that supported NTSC (both), PAL and SECAM over PAL RF encoding. I even at one time had a VCR that did French SECAM.
Geoff.
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm@mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM
Every one I've used (we have loads at work) has composite, RGB, and svideo inputs. They probably all take NTSC, they certainly specifically say "PAL" on the screen when they sync.
It's surprising anything works at all, so complicated!
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Whilst this was true once, later telecine machines from sometime in the '70s onwards with frame stores added a frame once a second to get back to the correct speed.
That was when the UK companies did their own transfers from features to tape.
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Dave Plowman dave@davenoise.co.uk London SW
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The commercial stations in the UK interupt the programmes also. It's not as bad as in the US, but a 1 hour programme will have probably 4 interuptions of up to 5 minutes each. Some of the satellite 'prime' stations such as Sky One have commercial breaks almost as bad as the US, as in the first break will be just a couple of minutes after the opening credits. Some of the independant - i.e. non Sky - stations are as bad, if not worse than the US ones.
The amount of advertising is controlled in the UK. And all the mainstream channels take their breaks at exactly the same time - to try and prevent channel hopping. Which looks dreadful on progs not made for this system - they simply crash out of them.
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I've just discovered something called "MythTV": basically a poor-man's Tivo that runs under Linux. It's kind of a hobbyist's thing in that it's far, far, far from plug-and-play. You have to work at it for awhile.
No cable, just a rooftop antenna.
I record stuff using Myth's scheduler and then watch it later.
Myth somehow flags the transitions between regular show and commercials.
The big thing is that the commercial flagging actually works....
As a result I can hit a key and skip past a commercial in about a half second.
Dunno if it's my long-term solution yet - and I'd pay a hundred or two hundred bucks for an alternative that has a better UI... but MythTV is definitely growing on me.
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