HD Roll-out timetable
England
| Area | Transmitter group | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Manchester | Winter Hill | 2 Dec 2009 |
| London | Crystal Palace | 2 Dec 2009 |
| Newcastle and Tyneside | Pontop Pike | Feb 2010 |
| Leeds / Bradford | Emley Moor | March 2010 |
| Birmingham | Lichfield | March 2010 |
| Liverpool, central Lancashire, Cheshire, north Staffordshire | Winter Hill relays | March 2010 |
| Exeter, parts of Devon, Somerset, Dorset | Stockland Hill | April 2010 |
| Bristol, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire | Mendip | April 2010 |
| Devon, Cornwall, and the Isles of Scilly | Beacon Hill, Caradon Hill, Huntshaw Cross, Redruth | Aug 2010 |
| Cumbria and the Lake District | Caldbeck | Oct 2010 |
Then Freeview HD rolls out with the rest of the switchover programme:
2011
Bedfordshire, Berkshire (parts), Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, East Anglia, East Midlands, East Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Humberside, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, South Yorkshire, Staffordshire (parts), Stoke-on-Trent, West Midlands (remainder), and West Yorkshire (remainder).
2012
Berkshire (remainder), County Durham, Greater London (remainder), Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Kent, Northumberland, North Yorkshire, Surrey, Sussex, Teesside, Tyneside.
Wales
| Area | Transmitter group | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Cardiff, Newport | Wenvoe | March 2010 |
| Swansea | Kilvey Hill | March 2010 |
| west and central Wales | Blaenplwyf | March 2010 |
| Carmarthenshire | Carmel | April 2010 |
| rest of Wales | Long Mountain, Moel y Parc, Presely | June 2010 |
| Anglesey | Llanddona | July 2010 |
Wales will have switched over to digital and the roll-out of Freeview HD will be complete by the end of July 2010.
Scotland
| Area | Transmitter group | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glasgow, central Scotland | Black Hill | Feb 2010 | |
| Shetland | Bressay | May 2010 | |
| Orkney | Keelylang Hill | May 2010 | |
| Caithness, North Sutherland | Rumster Forest | June 2010 | |
| Lewis, Wester Ross, North West Sutherland, Western Isles | Eitshal, Skriaig | July 2010 | |
| Angus, Dundee, Perth, and parts of Fife | Angus | Aug 2010 | |
| Aberdeenshire | Durris | Sept 2010 | |
| Morayshire, Strathspey, and parts of Easter Ross | Knockmore | Oct 2010 | |
| South West Scotland | Caldbeck Scotland | Oct 2010 | |
| Inverness and the Great Glen | Rosemarkie | Oct 2010 | |
| South West Highlands and Islands | Torosay | Oct 2010 | |
| Scottish Borders | Selkirk | Nov 2010 |
Northern Ireland
Freeview HD rolls out with the rest of the switchover programme so that the whole of Northern Ireland is switched over to digital and will be able to receive Freeview HD by the end of 2012.
Other areas
| Area | Transmitter group | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Isle of Man | Douglas | Oct 2010 |
| Channel Islands | Fremont Point | End 2010 |
No Freeview HD kit in time for launch, warns telly exec
COMMENTS
HD-Ready and other things - http://www.digitaleurope.org/
The HD-Ready logo is defined and managed by Digital Europe (formerly EICTA). The meaning is clear and has been for some time. The TV is ready to connect to an HD input device and has sufficient resolution.
"HD-Ready" - Means it will work show HD pictures with a Blu-ray player, Sky HD, Freesat HD, or Freeview HD box. If you have got a non-HD-Ready TV you really are stuffed.
"HDTV" - is the logo for built in decoder. And manufacturers have been responsible and not used this in the UK. DVB-T TVs with HD MPEG4 decoding have been available since late 2007 and have been sold in the UK without being promoted as such while they are being happily used on the continent for HD services.
Both the above logos have 1080P variants indicating 1920x1080 display and input support as additional requirements.
DVB-T2 demodulators are not yet available in quantity even to major manufacturers. The spec was finished a little over a year ago and actually development has gone as well as could be expected. There is no possibility of software upgrades to any DVB-T demodulator (unless it is FPGA based and about the size of a 32" TV).
This means that PC USB tuners, PS3 PlayTV, tuners STBs, PVRs and TVs current and past will not receive Freeview HD with existing hardware.
If anyone does know of anywhere that DVB-T2 products can be obtained please post the link. Especially a USB tuner would be good.
Re: Market status?
“To receive Freeview HD you will need:
[…]
b) A means of decoding the as-yet-unconfirmed and non-standard mechanism that will be used to encode the service information to ensure that only approved manufacturers who sign up to the DRM rules can make the boxes
[…]”
So long as it's MPEG-TS with the same meanings for certain IDs as for DVB-T and so long as free-to-air content is still broadcast in the clear, I don't see a major problem there; the likes of VDR will cope fine (and if not, well, there are users who will produce patches).
@Martin 15
This assumption is wrong:
"(1) The video coding MPEG4 AVC and that only comes down to software at the receiver."
The MPEG decoding in a TV or STB is a dedicated hardware block. That means you can make the main CPU relatively low-spec, which means cool and (very importantly) cheap. If you didn't have dedicated hardware to do it, then you'd need a monster CPU to do full HD decoding at 50/60Hz.
Having said that, most large TV manufacturers have been shipping MPEG-4 decoders in their TVs for the past few years, because there are a bunch of European countries already broadcasting it over DVB-T. It's just that the UK changed both the encoding spec and the modulation type at the same time.
I think customers who have recently bought large-format TVs have every right to feel aggrieved - the "HD Ready" logo situation is a shambles, and Freeview HD is no better. Apart from a hard core of enthusiast geeks and the TV industry, nobody knows what's going on (as these comment threads have demonstrated).
2012
Pah - oh well gives me chance to wait until the technology has caught up and I can get a DVB-T2 integrated TV or PVR that is cheap as chips.
dvb-t2
I know where I can get multiple DVB-T2 units
You could also get the modular boxes and wait for them to produce the tuner for them (which a lot probably would have already).
It's about time that our country grows up and stops calling anything from a Satellite Sky and Digital Terrestrial "Freeview".
The rest of Europe isn't like this... maybe because they aren't as thick as shit.
Freeview HD - it's just a package, just like Sky - gah.
