Does Britan have both cable and broadcast television? And do both feature commercial interruptions?
The essential question: Why do British actors look like people I know, not runway models?
Helen Mirren is absolutely beautiful. I fell in love with her while watching Prime Suspect.
Peace,
mangeorge
Its a bit complicated, but basically…
- Everyone who owns a TV pays a TV license (currently £145). The money from this goes to fund the BBC. The BBC provides 10 channels via digital (as well as 7 radio stations, a huge website, plus a load of regional radio stations), all of which are commercial free. The press seems to hate this, and is always criticising the BBC, but this is usually because they’ve invested in their own TV stations, and want to eliminate a competitor (particulalry Murdoch). For my money, I think the license fee is great value.
As they have a guaranteed income, the BBC is able to do TV that would probably be too risky for commercial TV, which is how they’ve made a name for themselves as a bit of an innovator.
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In addition to BBC, there are number of other free to air TV channels, that all contain adverts. These include ITV, Channel 4, and 5. I think there are about 30 on free-to-air digital, although there tends to be a pretty big drop off in quality. Most of them have lots of repeats and lots of adverts. Advertisting revenue is very low at the moment, and the commercial TV sector is not doing very well.
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Then, there are the premium cable channels. Most of these are run by Sky (owned by Murdoch). The movies and sports channels tend to cost quite a bit, although you don’t really have much choice if you want to watch the football. Most of these have commercials too. There are also a few that you get for free, such as Sky News (which is pretty awful, but nowhere near as bad as Fox news).
At a (very) rough guess, I’d say about 40% of people go for Sky.
I don’t think there is a specific reason why the actors look more peopley. There is just more of an emphasis put on acting ability over looks. This isn’t true of all shows though (I’m looking at you, Hollyoaks).
Great questions and answers! If I might be so bold to ask a few:
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Let’s say I’m a hardcore videophile and want to subscribe to all that cable has to offer in the UK. Roughly how much is that going to cost and what would I get for it?
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Is HD widely available and is local programming in HD?
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What are the sport channels like? Would I be able to get US sports?
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Are people that live near the English Channel able to pick up French television?
Yes.
Yes, except for the BBC.
They all look different. Some are stunning, others look like ordinary people. There is a normal range.
For clarity:
“Free-to-air digital” is a terrestrial, digital broadcast and can be picked up by anyone with a decent analog signal by using a regular antenna with a digibox at the other end. This includes the “big 5” (BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4, and Channel 5) stations and a load of other ones, plus digital radio. Many new TVs being sold here now incorporate the digibox so you don’t need a separate piece of apparatus.
Currently the “big 5” are also still broadcast terrestrially as an analog signal - but this is scheduled to be phased out.
If you have a basic cable package, you also get all the free-to-air channels that are in the digital package mentioned above, plus other channels bundled in by your cable provider.
As for cost, my basic cable TV (Virgin Media) comes free with my broadband/landline. Can’t speak about premium channels or anything but I think the costs do ramp up quite considerably.
Yikes, dunno. £40 or £50 per month, a thousand channels? Just a WAG.
We pay about £30 a month and have a few hundred channels. We watch less than a dozen of those.
Lots of channels have an HD version.
I don’t really watch 'em but I’ve seen them. I don’t know how to answer the question, though. The sports channels show sports. I think you’d have to be a bit more specific than “what are the sports channels like?”
American football and stuff like that is on sports channels, but not the major ones. You’d have to look for it.
Maybe used to be able to in the days of aerials, but I haven’t had an aerial for nearly a couple of decades (I think - I don’t remember exactly). With cable and satellite TV these days, though, it doesn’t work like that. There are, of course, hundreds of foreign channels to choose from should you be so inclined, but I’ve never looked at them.
Which is the main reason I don’t look at Hollyoaks.
I meant was are there UK equivalents to ESPN and the like? Could an American in London follow US baseball, basketball, or hockey? Do they show UK university sports and what are the major events they cover (soccer, cricket?)
There’s Sky Sports, ESPN (also on DTT), Eurosport, with several channels each. They show regular live games in the top levels of the big four US sports, and college football and basketball.
University sport is not big in the UK, apart from the traditional Boat Race (annual rowing event between Oxford and Cambridge universities). There are a couple of varsity matches in rugby union and other sports, but they don’t get much coverage.
Soccer is the dominant sport, the major events, roughly in order of importance for British viewers, being: World Cup; English Premier League; UEFA Champions League; European Championship; FA Cup; Europa Cup; Scottish Premier League; English Championship (second tier); League Cup; other major European domestic leagues such as Spain and Italy.
Cricket has its World Cup, international series featuring the England national team, especially the biennial Ashes series against Australia, the English (and Welsh) County Championship, and the new Twenty-Twenty events.
Rugby Union also has a World Cup every four years. Beside that, there’s an annual Six Nations tournament, and a Premier League for club sides.
Rugby League is not as big as Union but still pretty popular. It has a similar array of events to Union, with a showpiece Challenge Cup final each year for club sides.
Other major TV sports are Formula 1 motor racing, tennis, especially Wimbledon, athletics, certain horse races (the Grand National, the Derby), and… um, snooker? (Yep , really). [Edit] Oh, and golf of course.
There are a large number of free-to-air European channels which are available via satellite.
They are broadcast from a different bird than the UK free-to-air channels, so a separate dish is required.
I have cable for my UK television stations, but I have an old satellite box tuned to the Astra 19.2E bird which lets me watch free-to-air German TV.
On sport, there’s an ongoing contest between the free-to-air channels and subscription cable/satellite over certain iconic sporting events that are known as the Crown Jewels. The basic idea being that some sporting events are so significant, such a vital part of the nation’s cultural fabric, that they must be made available to all via the free-to-air channels and not scooped up by the subscription channels.
The list is constantly under review but includes e.g. the football cup final and Wimbledon. (It doesn’t currently include the Ashes, to my personal chagrin.) Questions over which sports have genuine national appeal/resonance and which don’t tend to become fairly fraught but essentially there will always be a core of sporting events which everyone with a TV will be able to watch, free at the point of use.
Good point. **BobLibDem **asked about pay channels, and I mentioned the World Cup and other “listed” events which have to given to the free-to-air (not necessarily non-commercial) broadcasters. I always enjoying seeing Sky Sports squirm when the World Cup is on - they have to talk about it, it being the biggest soccer tournament of them all, but they can’t show it.
Ooh great thread, and very helpful answers!
Now could you explain “Freeview” and Red Button programming for neophytes? As I understand it, the “Red Button” stuff is basically what used to be teletext, right? We don’t really have that here in the US (or at least it’s not very popular at all) so it’s fascinating to me. I envision it as a glorified webpage – text, images/sound/video – but maybe I’m off.
Also, am I correct in that many of the regular channels also duplicate their programming an hour later? And are these extra “+1” channels free, or only on cable? And … why do they do that, when DVRs and VCRs are so rampant? Or do fewer people have DVRs over on your side of the pond?
Freeview is “buy a box, get a bunch of cable/satellite channels free for ever”. No premium channels I imagine (I don’t have one, but I assume not).
Red Button is interactive service via the red button on the remote control. Yeah, a very fancy teletext type thing, but more interactive. You can do stuff like vote for who to evict in reality shows or enter competitions, or see extra content, stuff like that.
Quite a lot have a +1 version. If you have access to the normal version, you’ll also have access to the +1 version.
I don’t know why they do it. I do find it useful occasionally if I’m trying to record too many things at once (I think the Sky+ Box I have lets me record two things to the hard drive and watch one, so if I want a fourth I have to use the +1 channel - and it’s weird how everything I want to watch, given hundreds of available hours during the week, is all on at exactly the same time on a Tuesday night…)
DVR and VCRs… video tape recorders aren’t really used these days; I haven’t seen one in many, many years. I never fully understood what Americans meant when they said “DVR” but I assume that my Sky+ box is a “DVR”? Records stuff to the hard drive, anyway.
The +1 channels are sometimes placeholders while the broadcaster develops some other channel. They are constantly tinkering with their portfolios of channels. And on satellite specifically there is, AIUI, virtually unlimited bandwidth, so it’s no biggie to have a +1 channel.
Sky+ is a DVR, and Virgin and other cable operators have their own DVRs too. There are also quite a few Freeview DVRs, which therefore don’t need a subscription - they use the listings provided by Freeview. “Freeview” is just a name for the free-to-air DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) service which is replacing the traditional analogue channels. DTT is sometimes informally referred to as Freeview, but there are also pay channels on DTT.
Personally I love the +1 channels.
Nothing worse than sitting down and flicking through the channels, to find a good film on that you would like to watch, but that started half an hour ago.
No problem, you can catch it from the start on the +1 channel.
Surely the real question is why do American TV actors (almost) all look like models rather than regular people (or even regularly good-looking people).
I imagine the answer has to to do with the intense competition for audiences within an (almost) entirely commercial system operating in a very large market, but that may not be the whole story.
Thanks Candyman74 and Ximenean! Though am I right and your Freeview answers aren’t quite the same? The former says it’s a pay-once big package, the latter says it’s just what people call regular TV. (Or maybe I’m misunderstanding Ximenean’s explanation.)
bucketybuck: “Nothing worse than sitting down and flicking through the channels, to find a good film on that you would like to watch, but that started half an hour ago.”
Ah, but what if you discover the film on the +1 channel first? Then you have to wish for a +2 channel! 
Sorry for the reference to DVRs – Digital Video Recorders, they’re set-top boxes that, like your Sky box, allow people to download shows to view later. They have lots of extra features such as being able to program the box to capture any show with, say, David Mitchell (that’d keep the machine pretty busy!), or all repeats of MASH*, no matter the channel or time. Cable companies offer DVR-capable boxes for extra fees on top of your regular package, but the most popular version is, I think, still Tivo, which isn’t associated with any cable company.
One of the many things I love about the BBC and Channel 4 is how much more open they are with their programming, i.e. making it available online. (Though the BBC only have theirs available for a week after airing, it’s still a great feature. I was able to enjoy “The Trip” right away, where normally I would have to wait for it to release to DVD, if that – I highly doubt US TV will pick it up.) C4 in particular offers a treasure trove of archived series. (Of course, it’s available only to those in the UK, or those who can, uh, approximate a UK existence. Anyway.) My point is, here in the States we aren’t nearly as blessed; some network shows are offered online, some aren’t. Kind of a crapshoot.
Why do you think this is? Is it simply because all our stuff is commercial, whereas the BBC’s isn’t? But C4 shows have ads, don’t they? So that doesn’t really explain it. Even our public broadcasting stations, which aren’t commercial, aren’t nearly as generous with their offerings.
PBS stations generally don’t own the programs that they broadcast.
No, he said the same thing.
You buy the box once and the channels are free thereafter. He explained which channels those were (since I don’t have one I didn’t know) and it seems it’s all the channels which are free over the airwaves anyway.
Yeah, same sort of thing. My own Sky+ box doesn’t do the “anything with David Mitchell” thing, but I don’t know what the other boxes do (or newer Sky+ boxes). It does the “all episodes of…” etc.
I really have no idea. From conversations with people on messageboards, I got the impression that was fairly widespread in the US too - I’m certainly forever seeing posts where folks are telling people to watch episodes (legally) online. But you’d know better than me! Don’t you have Hulu and stuff like that? I can’t access it being outside the US, but I was under the impression there was a lot of stuff on there.
Maybe. I honestly don’t know. I use the BBC iPlayer a hell of a lot (it really is utterly awesome, especially when it’s output on my TV) but I’ve never looked at the online offerings of other channels. I heard the ITV one wasn’t very good, and I think I may have looked at it once and agreed .