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Freeview is a free-to-air digital television service in the United Kingdom broadcast from terrestrial transmitters using the DVB-T standard. Launched on October 30 2002 at 6am, it took over the DTT licence on 4 multiplexes to broadcast from the defunct ITV Digital.
Unlike ITV Digital and the cable and satellite digital TV services, it offers no subscription, premium or pay-per-view channels. All that is needed to receive the Freeview service is a set-top box costing around £30 to £100, or a new television with an integrated digital tuner. An annual television licence fee is levied for the service, the same fee that covers the analogue channels.
Freeview is jointly owned by the BBC, Crown Castle International and British Sky Broadcasting. It broadcasts the existing free-to-air analogue channels (BBC One, BBC Two, ITV1, Channel 4 (S4C in Wales) and five plus about twenty other channels provided by the BBC, ITV companies, Sky, Crown Castle, The Walt Disney Company and a number of independent companies.
The interactive information channel BBCi, along with several other interactive services are broadcast on Freeview.
A subscription based service, Top Up TV launched in March 2004 using unused channel space. The Top Up TV service is not a part of the Freeview service; it runs alongside it on the DTT platform. Additionally, services on Multiplex 2 (Digital 3 and 4) and Multiplex A (SDN) are not part of the Freeview service, but are often advertised as being part of Freeview.
At the end of 2004, it was reported that over 5 million households in the UK have Freeview, making it the second most popular digital TV format in the UK
Full list of TV channels
Full list of radio stations
The multiplexes
The Freeview channels are actually broadcast in six groups, or multiplexes, which are imaginatively labelled multiplex (or, sometimes, mux) 1, 2, A, B, C & D. Each multiplex represents a certain amount of bandwidth, which can be used for any combination of compressed video, audio and data.
Within a multiplex it is possible to make trade offs between the number of channels and the quality of the picture and audio. Each of these multiplexes was given to the control of a different company, and they uniformly decided to go for quantity of channels over quality of service. Many grumpy engineers of the old school, bought up to believe in producing a high quality service, as well as members of the public with modern hi-fis and large television sets, are not terribly impressed by this.
When the British government allocated the multiplexes, it gave half the capacity on a multiplex to each existing analogue terrestrial broadcaster. This meant the BBC got a multiplex to themselves, ITV and Channel 4 shared the second, Channel 5 and S4C shared the third. The remaining space was then auctioned off. A consortium of Granada and Carlton (then members of the ITV network, now merged) along with BSkyB successfully bid for, and set-up, the OnDigital (later ITV Digital) service. ITV Digital collapsed in a messy cloud of football and recriminations in 2002. The multiplexes were consequently taken over by a consortia of the BBC, CCI (who operate the transmission network) and BSkyB. In May 2004, a new service (Top Up TV) was launched to provide subscription content in unused space on Multiplexes 2 and A.
Multiplex 1 - BBC
TV: BBC ONE, BBC TWO, BBC THREE, CBBC Channel, BBC News 24
Radio: BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio nan Gaidheal (Scotland Only), BBC Radio Ulster and BBC Radio Foyle (Northern Ireland Only), BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio Cymru (Wales Only)
Interactive Services : BBCi
Multiplex 2 - Digital 3 and 4
TV: ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, Channel 4, GMTV, GMTV 2, UKTV Food*, E4*, Bloomberg*, ITV News
Interactive Services : Teletext on 4, Teletext
Multiplex A - SDN
TV: five, abc1 (Not in Wales), S4C (Wales Only), S4C~2 (Wales Only), Tele-G (Scotland Only), QVC, bid-up.tv, UKTV Gold*, TCM*, Boomerang*, Cartoon Network*, Discovery*, Discovery Home and Leisure*, Television X*, UKTV Style*, Screenshop, price-drop.tv, Screenshop 2, Top Up TV Advertisement
Radio: BBC Radio 1 (England version), 2, 3, 4 (FM version), Mojo, Heat.
Multiplex B - BBC
TV: BBC Four, CBeebies, BBC Parliament, News loops (Available via BBCi), Community channel
Radio: BBC 1Xtra, BBC Radio Five Live, BBC Five Live Sports Extra, BBC 6 Music, BBC 7, BBC Asian Network
Interactive : BBCi {extra content}, "701", "702", "703" (carrying BBC Parliament and the News Loops)
Multiplex C - CCI
TV: Sky Travel, Sky News, UKTV History, Sky Sports News
Radio: talkSport, 3C, Premier Radio
Multiplex D - CCI
TV: UKTV Bright Ideas, The Hits, ftn, TMF, Thomas Cook TV, Ideal World
Radio: BBC World Service (Europe), The Hits Radio, Smash Hits, Kiss 100, Magic 105.4, Q, Oneword, Jazz FM 102.2, Kerrang)
* indicates a Pay TV service
The astute reader will notice that some of these multiplexes carry a much larger number of services than others. Firstly, a number of services share bandwidth - so some channels turn off when others are on. (For example you will never see BBC Four and CBeebies together in the same room, as they use the same space in Multiplex B.) In addition, some multiplexes have fewer channels so as to allocate more data to fewer services, thus ensuring higher quality (for example, BBC One on Multiplex 1 is carried as a 5.5 Megabit stream, while Sky Sports News uses 2 Megabits per second.) On top of this, the modulation of the multiplexes is varied to squeeze more digital bandwidth out of the same portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This comes at the cost of making it harder to get a good signal. There are three basic modulation schemes currently in use in the UK; QPSK (only used for tests in the Oxford and London areas), 16 QAM and 64 QAM, with progressively more bandwidth, and progressively higher likelihood of signal degradation.
Currently multiplexes 2 and A use 64 QAM (and are consequently more prone to poor reception) while the other multiplexes all currently use 16 QAM.
Furthermore, multiplexes can make use of Statistical Multiplexing whereby the bitrate allocated to a channel within the multiplex can vary dynamically depending on how difficult it is to code the picture content at that precise time. In this way, complex pictures with lots of detail may demand a higher bitrate at one instant and this can result in the bitrate allocated to another channel in the same multiplex being reduced if the second channel is currently transmitting pictures which are easier to code, with less fine detail.
7 Day EPG
As of Monday 26th July 2004 the 7 Day Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) began to roll out across the country. This technology, which has been tested previously this year, means that users are able to view a full week of programme schedules on specially enabled Freeview Boxes.
See also
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