Is freeview worth having?

[papercorn2000]

I wouldn't imagine that the decoder uses much in the way of power. The recorders yes as they have a hard disc.

I used to like Film4 and paid for it when it first came out. There was such a huge variety of film that I had never seen or even heard of! But it has recently gone downhill and it rarely shows anything that I haven't seen or want to see.

 

[alecstilleyedye]

you'll have no choice soon anyway. i believe aldi will be doing a freeview box for under £20 later this month. if budget permits, get one of the pvr ones that acts as a video recorder and lets you pause the telly. a fab innovation.

 

[Bigtallfatbloke]

Thanks.

...erm....is this good?

Transmitter 1: BBC 2: Digital 3 & 4 A: SDN B: BBC C: NG Wireless D: NG Wireless Gp Pol OS grid ref. OD
m Field
dBµV/m Distance
miles Bearing
degrees Antenna
(suggestion)
UHF ERP
W AOD
m UHF ERP
W AOD
m UHF ERP
W AOD
m UHF ERP
W AOD
m UHF ERP
W AOD
m UHF ERP
W AOD
m
Crystal Palace 25 20k 321 22 20k 321 32 20k 321 28 20k 321 34 20k 321 29 20k 321 A H TQ339712 110 41 24 241 Amplified extra hi-gain
Bluebell Hill 59 3k 244 24 2k 239 27 2k 239 45 3k 244 42 3k 244 39 3k 244 W H TQ757613 191 27 19 166 Amplified extra hi-gain



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Notes

 

[Morrisette]

I can beat your 5 channels, we only have 4 (5 is snow). And there is my problem. 'Free' view would not be free at all after I've paid for a whole new aerial to be fitted.

I think the whole digital tv switch thing is being handled really badly. The signal in Suffolk where I live is useless, a lot of old ladies are going to be left without a working TV at all when they switch off analogue. Plus a lot of villages, small towns, don't have cable, and have snowy reception on analogue (which I believe means that the Freeview box won't work) so you are left with a choice of Sky, or Sky.

That's quite apart from the fact of millions of perfectly good 'second' portable TV sets being thrown away. Hardly the greenest idea???

 

[Arch]

I'll see your five channels and raise you...

Black and white!

I'm aiming to be the last person in the country watching in black and white...

 

[User482]

Yes, because the analogue signal is being switched off round here in 2009. For £20 the main benefits are more football on channels like ITV4 and digital teletext is much faster. On the downside, reception can be a bit iffy for many more people than the old analogue system, and the digibox uses electricity, so TV watching is more expensive and less green than before.

Indeed. I was shocked to discover that my freeview box was using over 10W of electricity - in standby! And of course there was no proper on/off button. Irrelevant now as I've replaced it with an LCD TV with integrated digital - which uses less than 1W in standby (my meter only measures down to 1W).

 

[User482]

Ooh, fogot to add. If you are into football, you can get Setanta on freeview for around £10 per month. They show a small number of premier league matches & SPL, but if you look at why Sky charge, it's not bad value.

 

[Fnaar]

I've only got 4 channels, and freeview doesn't work on my street! However, I really don't care! If I want to watch telly, I can always find something to watch, but I generally find I watch telly probably 4 days out of 7, then only for an hour or two... my kids would like it (and at some point I guess we will, satellite, I s'pose, though I'm not paying for any cr@p channels) but parents of their friends always complain that it tends to cause arguments over how much to watch and arguments between the kids over what to watch. I'd rather they were reading, or out in the fresh air, or doing summat useful, to be honest. We do get into shows from time to time, and watch them regularly, and have a Friday evening set in stone routine of me cooking the tea in order to coincide exactly with the start of the Simpsons on Ch4; the only time we ever have a tv dinner...

 

[Ghost Donkey]

TDF and other occasional cyling on ITV4. Live cycling was on the BBC interactive last weekend. Other than that I like the boxing on ITV4 and if you like endless repeats of sharpe, quincy, who wants to be a millionaire, anything with real life police chases or WW2 documentaries then you're set .

 

[thejonesy]

I've got a freeview recorder, which was great during the summer as I recorded a fortnight of TdF and watched it all unfold in one evening when I got back off my hols. The missus was well chuffed!

Dead easy to use if you choose a decent one and you can pause and rewind live TV which still freaks me out a bit

 

[papercorn2000]

Yeah, documentary channels seem to show loads of WW2 and sharks. Great until you actually want to record a sharks documentary for a topic at school. Do they show sharks then? Do they heck!

 

[zimzum42]

The change has been a disaster as far as I'm concerned; we sit like morons all evening flicking from channel to channel because there's always something you can watch. We are less fit and we are achieveing less work on the house than when we only had 4 or 5 channels.

Surely that is your problem and not that of freeview? it's not like freeview makes you sit and flick, you could always turn it off and go out.......

 

[domtyler]

We have Sky+ with 6 channel choices (?), no premiums, Sky Talk (free phone calls) and Sky Broadband basic (2gb per month limit, 2mb download speed) and it only costs about £20 per month which I am pretty satisfied with.

Sky+ is fantastic for any Trekkies out there as me and my wife are, we watch 2 per night normally and sometimes have a marathon catch up session on the weekend.

 

[Cycling Naturalist]

We got a better picture.

 

[Mortiroloboy]

We have four TV's in the house two hooked up to Sky and the kids Telly's which have freeview, IMHO it's mostly 56 channels of pure drivel, with the occasional decent programme, I much prefer the wireless.