DAB [was Re: Books & Audiobooks (was [JOB] Perl Software Developer and Database programmer)]

[Nicholas Clark]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 02:03:01PM +0000, Roger Burton West wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 01:49:55PM +0000, Nicholas Clark wrote:
> 
> >I fail to understand why they're expecting us to shift either from FM to DAB,
> >or analogue to digital TV, given that the quality on the digital is soooo
> >much worse.
> 
> Because the government wants to sell off the analogue frequencies for
> lots of money (and presumably the usual "special considerations").

And for even more fun expects us to pay for the sell off (by having the BBC
lead the transition, and allowing it to raise the licence fee to pay for
this) and yet will then trouser the cash from the sell off.

Yes, I know that the taxpayer has to pay for arranging the sell off somehow.
It just doesn't seem very financially transparent to divorce the cost of
making the asset saleable (ie the cost of freeing up the spectrum) from the
income gained from selling the asset.

I suspect that the only people really happy with all this are the BBC, as I
can't forsee the licence fee ever going down after the transition, even 
though they no-longer need to spend money on it.

No, I'm not trying to bash the BBC here. I rather like the BBC's content that
I read/listen to. It's just that the whole thing smells less than transparent.
And we're likely to get lower (physical) quality at the end of it, due to the
desire to spread the same content, resources and talent across ever increasing
numbers of channels.

It's about as sweet and innocent as Sky and the BBC teaming up to create
freeview. Mmm, why did two mortal enemies find common cause? For the public
good?

Nicholas Clark