Technical delivery options for local television services in the UK

Research Document Published 21|09|10

Executive Summary

The Government has made clear that establishing Local TV in the UK is a policy priority and has set up the Shott enquiry to examine what conditions might be necessary to make Local TV commercially viable.

Following detailed discussions with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Nicholas Shott and his team, this report sets out the technical options for introducing local television services across the UK. The report provides a comparison of the benefits and costs of using the different platforms: terrestrial, satellite, cable and via broadband. Each platform offers its own set of advantages and disadvantages for carrying local television services.

This report does not consider how spectrum or existing capacity could be secured for local television. It is for government to decide how, if at all, to intervene to secure spectrum resources or multiplex capacity for local television or to rely upon commercial mechanisms.

The choice of approach depends upon objectives

The choice of which approach is most appropriate will depend upon the objectives for the local service including considerations such as:

• Localness- the number of separate locations that are intended to receive local television services and their size;
• Delivery - how well those areas align with the boundaries inherent in the various platforms (for example with existing transmitter coverage patterns);
• Coverage - the level of coverage required (for example the proportion of households in the target area or as a proportion of the UK that should be able to receive the local services); and
• Economics the cost of presence on a platform and supporting business model

As many of the above are yet to be determined, we have for the purposes of this study considered how local television could be delivered to the most populous urban areas in the UK as it seems likely that economic drivers for local television will be most favourable in those areas. We have proposed as a starting point an indicative list of twenty five urban areas including the four UK nations capital cities and twenty one of the largest urban areas and carried out a comparison of the various approaches to providing local television services in those areas.

Each platform presents opportunities and also constraints

Satellite could provide reliable coverage across the UK to nearly all households and can offer a single channel number for local services (so that pressing channel number N would always deliver the appropriate local TV service). There are constraints and costs if a finer localness than the existing broadcaster regions is desired. Also, any local service on satellite would be broadcast across the UK but would only potentially be relevant to a few areas. To provide many local services in this way is likely to involve a high cost.

Cable offers the ability to provide localised television services. Availability is limited to the homes passed by the cable operators. Households would also have to pay a subscription to receive television services via cable.

Broadband offers a low-cost entry to delivery of video with costs that scale according to demand. However, services delivered in this way are currently not easily found and the inability easily to watch these services on main television sets and the current level of broadband uptake (which requires a monthly payment) means that local television via broadband would not be universally available. Some of these disadvantages are likely to become less of an issue in the future as delivery of video content via broadband connections becomes more mainstream through IP-enabled television sets (IPTVs) and other initiatives that incorporate broadband delivery of content.

Terrestrial television can offer a number of options:

a) New local geographic interleaved multiplexes local television operators would build new relatively low cost digital television transmitters (probably at existing transmission sites) that make use of geographic interleaved spectrum (capacity available within the spectrum that will be used to carry existing multiplexes) to target specific communities. This approach is not completely flexible, and the coverage achieved would be limited in some areas. However, both the absolute and opportunity costs of this approach are relatively low.

b) Carriage in an existing multiplex a local service could occupy a slot in one of the existing UK-wide Public Service Broadcaster (PSB) or commercial multiplexes. Coverage would be extensive, but targeting would be constrained by the boundaries of coverage of the existing transmitter network which may not always align with desired areas. This approach would require at least one UK-wide slot to be secured by local services which could mean the loss of an existing programme service to viewers a relatively high opportunity cost. Alternatively, it may be that capacity could be timeshared with an existing service probably resulting in a lower opportunity cost (although still not insignificant if the local service operated during peak hours). Significant costs may be incurred by the local service for engineering work to add the capability to insert local services into the multiplex or for circuits to present the local service to the centralised multiplexing centres used by the existing multiplex operators.

c) Carriage in a new UK-wide multiplex the process of digital switchover will release some valuable portions of spectrum (known as the 600MHz band) that could be used to broadcast one or two additional national television multiplexes, perhaps carrying high definition television services. A slot in one of these multiplexes could be secured by local services and could achieve good coverage. However, this could place constraints on the extent to which the multiplex could be utilised for other services and therefore carry a relatively high opportunity cost. It is also likely that a new multiplex would by default not feature the ability to insert local services and additional engineering work would be needed to add the capability to insert local services into the multiplex.

Targeting the twenty five locations is possible with compromises

All of the options would permit local television services to be provided. Carriage in either a PSB or commercial multiplex would offer good coverage, although there would be constraints on targeting local services to some of the locations. The commercial multiplex option would leave reception holes in some of the areas, for example a significant portion of Leeds is served by a relay a transmitter that does not carry the commercial multiplexes.

The coverage that could be achieved by the options using new spectrum is based upon an initial technical assessment and further work would be required to develop plans for specific areas. However, it should be possible to serve all of the 25 locations using either new local GI multiplexes or through carriage in a new UK-wide multiplex in the 600MHz frequency band. The coverage offered by local GI multiplexes is limited in some areas and previous studies indicated that coverage would not be good in some areas, for example Bristol, Bournemouth and Reading. However, these studies were not aiming to target any particular area or community and it may be possible to optimise frequency plans to improve the coverage offered by local GI multiplexes once firm target areas are known.
Satellite offers UK-wide coverage and good availability to households that possess satellite receivers in the 25 locations.

Most of the 25 areas are at least partially cabled and local television services could be offered in those areas to households that subscribe to cable television services, with the exception of Kingston upon Hull where cable television services are not currently available.

Broadband is available throughout all of the 25 target areas, although a small number of households may be too far from their local exchanges to receive a sufficiently high quality of service to permit reliable streaming of video content.

Further work would be required to refine proposals

This report is intended to provide an overview of the technical issues associated with the delivery of local television services - further work would be required to develop detailed plans. In particular the spectrum studies behind the local GI multiplex coverage maps were carried out prior to recent decisions across Europe to make some changes to international frequency plans to harmonise clearance of the 800MHz band. These changes will have an impact on the UKs frequency plans and therefore the availability of spectrum for local television multiplexes. If providing local GI multiplexes becomes a preferred option, detailed planning work would need to be carried out to determine the actual coverage that could be achieved.

We have made assumptions on a number of other technical matters such as the degree of regionality that is possible with the existing platforms and on matters such as presence on Electronic Programme Guides. While these assumptions have been informed by discussions with industry, no detailed investigations into the technical feasibility (or attendant costs) have been carried out.

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