Because of this special day in the UK, I decided to write this entry in English for once. The small cumbrian town of Whitehaven wrote television history. BBC Two was the first channel to come in colour on UHF, it is also the first to disappear.
Tonight at 2 am the analogue signal of BBC Two on the Whitehaven transmitter was turned off. Some minutes later it was replaced by ITV 1. On the old ITV channel the first mux (Freeview MUX 1) was started. The other three analogue channels will disappear in November. Then people in Whitehaven will be able to get around 20 channels with their aerials.
There was some television coverage of the event, for example on Sky News. A funny thing happened on GM.TV where the director of OFCOM mixed up TV-AM an gm.tv
But it seems that also in the UK some people always compain like you can read here. Still, the UK remains the champion of digital televison. As I mentioned earlier, I would have no problems switching to Sky, as long I can get Tagesschau and Arena by DVB-T and TalkTäglich on Zattoo. But I would not miss the stations from Germany.
I try to get some more videos on. Newsnight had a nice report last night, maybe they will talk about it today.
In one thing however we are better then the Brits. Our switchover will be completed on the 26th of November. I hope SF will show the switch off, so we can say goodbye to good old channel 3 on VHF. I must admit though, that the UK hast a lot more transmitters to fix 😉