Digital television for the terminally confused.
Created | Updated Sep 21, 2005
Hiya!
This I actually wrote for a project a while ago, but I thought some other people would find it useful. I thought it was good enough to use as MY FIRST GUIDE ENTRY!!! YAY!
Before I begin, I would like to thank Lucy for helping me, plus big Ta's to my mates Ed and Dave for explaining this to me through a variety of ways that only just stopped at a demostration by sock puppets.
The help was much appreciated,
Macphisto.
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Digital television is the new way forward for television, unless you are part of that six percent of people who say they will never change, even if it is advertiused by a F1 driver. It is one of the only things on television advertised at the moment that isn't life insurance or a bank loan. On the BBC, freeview is advertised by monkeys.
The way digital televison is broadcast is the main difference between anologue, or normal television. Anologue television is broadcast through radio waves. The amount of information you can send is limiting down the signal, and anologue signals also have an annoying habit of running out of power. Signal can also be affected by hoovers, trees or the geography of an area. However, it gives you five channels and all the Ant and Dec a normal person can handle.
Digital televison is a signal made up of binary code, or zeros and ones. A big advantage of having this information as binary is that the waves can be compressed, so more information can be sent down them. This means that there can be more channels or services. It is an improvement on anologue. Channels can be either from the good (MTV, UKG2), the bad (the channel that shows 'Model world') or the downright bizarre (such as the shopping channels where all the stuff appears to have fallen off a van in tibet).
Digital television can also give you interactive services such as BBCi-which is great for the lottery, and Sky active-which gives you the chance to pay £1 everyday for the chance to play a game of theirs. Thing's like sky plus give the average person the oppertunity to tape every living thing in existance while you are watching another channel. This naturally opens up many oppertunities (though if in doubt, you can garentee that everything that can be repeated will be repeated on digital television through the +1 channels) The programmes you tape are loaded onto a harddrive, which you can access with one of the largest television remotes ever created.
The advantages of digtial television is the choice-though admittedly that can be debatable. the amnount of stuff you wil watch will usually be in direct contrast to the amount of channels available. The quality of what you recieve will only be helped by your tv too. Though if you want to have the chance to watch four different episodes of Jerry Springer where a guy marries a horse on four different channels, then that can't be all bad.
