Future of Analogue TV and radio?

[Buleste]

TV companies are trying to be everything to all people and failing miserably. BBC has 4 TV channels and about 2,000,000 radio stations (OK exagerating on Radio a little but not by much) and god knows how many chanels ITV have got with all these +1's turning up. The ITV channels are poor at best and BBC does produce some good stuff but most of it's repeats. Channel 4 and all it's varients is OK when they don't have Big Brother on but it is swamped by too much "reality" programming. Channel 5 can only be recieved if you live under a transmitter and haven't died of cancer. As for digital channels, well i scan the listings and the fact you have several channels dedicated to repeats says it all. But still soon we'll be able to have our repeats in HD. Won't that be fun.

[Harrison]

The freeview digital channels are on the whole pointless. They are the channels on sky that people flick through when bored, not channels people would have one every day. The exceptions are Sky News, BBC New 24, E4 and BBC3. Not sure any others are though.

The idea behind sky and cable has however always been a good one, to split the channels into types of viewing, with movie and sports channels being good because you don't have to then worry about normal scheduled programs on the main channels being cancelled for a football match, and you always know where to go when you want to watch a film. Plus there are a lot of other good channels in the lineup, such as Sky 1,2,3 which do have a lot of good programs, Sci-Fi and FX if you like Sci-Fi series and films, the Music channels, although many of those are now filled with musicless music (hiphop, r&b, rap etc... where's the White music?)

One think I am glad about is that they finally split the channel categories down more and have the religious channels their own section. That way I never have to scan through them!

One thing that is amusing though is that Sky promote the Sky+ feature as being great to have stuff recorded for when "nothing is on". Surely that should never happen?

[AlexJ]

The freeview digital channels are on the whole pointless. They are the channels on sky that people flick through when bored, not channels people would have one every day. The exceptions are Sky News, BBC New 24, E4 and BBC3. Not sure any others are though.

Dave can usually be relied on to have something watchable on if there's nothing else on and Film4 occasionally has something worth watching especially less mainstream and older films but suffers (like all film channels) from the fact if you haven't already seen it at the cinema or on DVD by the time it's on a film channel, it's probably not worth watching.

[Harrison]

Dave is quite a useful channel, especially if you are a Top Gear fan!

As for the film channel argument. I tend to only see the must see films at the cinema and then just wait for the rest to appear on Sky. And I only buy DVDs these days if a film is really something special. If it is one I will only ever watch twice at most then I don't buy it.