But the hard switch Germany is only possible because there aren’t a lot of people actually using terrestrial to watch TV. Just a little bit over the part you quoted it says only 10% are using terrestrial.
Not to mention the fact that the commercial broadcasters are encrypting their channels and you have to pay about 100 AUD per Year for them in HD.
This doesn’t take away anything from my point. The same campaign could still be mounted with Freeview.
10% of German households is approximately 8 million people. 8 million people live in Sydney and Melbourne combined, and I assume most households have at least one TV with only FTA. If the Govt wanted, it could legislate that “Freeview in Sydney and Melbourne must be DVB-T2 by June 2018”. You would be rolling out DVB-T2 to more people than Germany’s terrestrial broadcasting market while only needing to convert a fraction of the transmitters. You don’t need as many ads to reach two markets of 8 million as you need to reach 8 million interspersed with 80 million either, so promotional campaigns would be far cheaper.
So theoretically, it could be: DVB-T2 mandatory in Sydney and Melbourne by June 2018, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide by June 2019, all regional markets by 2021. You’d be rolling out DVB-T2 and MPEG-4 to ~13 million people in four years, the whole TV market in five years. The staggering of the switch-over would allow campaigns to be concentrated in areas closest to switching.
It’s possible. All it requires is the networks and Freeview to get off their arses, make an investment and put together a decent promotional push and we could be all-HD by 2020.
The dream 
Well said. Of course we all would rather 4K UHD then as it would be standard by 2020 but we can’t have everything I guess
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Something I didn’t expect…
“48 Hours” on TEN at 2am (now as I type) is HD…
Go figure…
I reckon it will take longer for 4K to make an impact than it did for HD.
With our current broadcasting technologies the way it is, a 4K channel would require an dedicated frequency for itself ie. there would be no space for even a SD secondary channel on it.
We COULD possibly see a 4K broadcast as a “one off” like we saw with 3D for State Of Origin a few years ago.
[quote=“mubd, post:701, topic:279, full:true”]
How old is it?[/quote]
Purchased March 2010. It only understands MPEG-2.
My Kogan from 2014 is MPEG-4.
Meanwhile the other 2 Kogan TV’s from 2011 are MPEG-2 only.
What about that ‘other’ unassigned channel hmmmmm 
That’s also what I was thinking of.
They could just do it the same way as the British do it since 2010 or the aforementioned Germans do since June and make a temporary DVB-T2 transmission and give every network an additional channel to broadcast in HD on.
That way Seven for example could finally sort out their HD mess with the AFL by simply broadcasting 7 and 7mate in HD everywhere. Nine and Ten could give HD back to Gem and One, SBS could do Viceland in HD and the ABC could do ABc2/ABC Kids in HD (provided they can broadcast anything in HD 
, though they’re not the first ones in the World to pull of a HD channel without HD content).
And then in a few years the old DVB-T broadcasts transition to DVB-T2 and MPEG4 HD and shut down the temporary transmission again.
Just imagine it.
This was posted on Whirlpool forums on Friday and subsequent posts state the ABC’s head of programming has indicated it to be the case during an interview on ABC Radio:
ABC HD will start transmitting HD content for the first time with the NYE fireworks. They didn’t want to make that the first time the actual channel went live and expect people to start tuning their set top boxes or TV’s on the night, so they have started the channel a few weeks early to get people tuned in. It will only broadcast SD content until the NYE fireworks, and the content broadcast on that channel will be HD from therein.
I wouldn’t trust Australian networks to use to technology to provide better picture quality. If they (and the public) were interested in that, they would drop the infomercial channels and reduce the number of multichannels. They could fit 2 x MPEG 4 HD channels on the multiplex now, have them both simulcast in SD and still have room left over for another multichannel.
Perhaps, Australia should wait for the next HD format. By the time DBV-T2 was implemented here it would be obsolete in the rest of the world.
So NZ not only uses MPEG-4 for everything they also have faster better quality internet.
That’s it I’m moving back… not lol
But why does Australia have to always be behind when it comes to technology or so it seems…
Why can’t they do HD now?
It’s not that they can’t, they have chosen not to.
They will start their HD broadcasting with what they believe is a big event broadcast.
IMO other than the actual fireworks, it’s a big yawn fest. But that’s for another discussion.
Largely due to a huge amount of land and a relatively small population spread out over that large area. Plus a bit of politics to slow things down even more.
Australia is the 80% country!
We do things to 80% potential - then we fold our arms and go “that’s pretty good for a little country”
Nine still playing the odd 4:3 movie 
Andre (1994)
So why have they communicated none of that until now?? And even then it was just via an interview on ABC radio somewhere? All these marketing people they employ and they couldn’t get this message out?
Big PR balls up from ABC. They should know better.
Maybe just the fireworks in HD and then back to upconverted SD afterwards?
I agree.
If the intention was to launch ABC HD on New Years Eve, then why didn’t they just run a placeholder slide (“ABC HD launches on December 31 for Sydney’s New Years Eve Fireworks in spectacular High Definition. For more info call this number, etc.”) on LCN-20 until December 31?
One would like to hope that will not be the case!
