By which I mean, are the areas of the UK that can pick up RTE (Northern Ireland and some parts of Wales) and vice versa (Irish border and East Coast areas) so small that the prospects of border raids for licenses are limited? Or is there some technical way of reducing viewers across border?
Just wondering, given that in Belfast we have the option of exchanging ITV channels for RTE channels on cable.
My curiosity was piqued when I caught a great sitcom last night, a serious Polish drama over dubbed with some silly dialogue.
There isn’t much overlap between the service areas of Irish and British transmitters, but nobody worries too much about cross-border viewing anyway. There is no technical difference between British and Irish analogue TV.
I can remember my father asking for a “dual standard” TV and the old black and white TV in my room had a separate VHF and UHF dial, one did north of the border, the other south. Was that an attempt to keep the two from mixing?
This is correct. And there’s also the question of cable systems in the Republic, re-broadcasting British TV signals ( I think they pay a fee to be allowed do it, but it’s a small fee). I vaguely seeing some figure claiming that 75% of the Irish population have access to British TV. I wouldn’t disbelieve that. Bottom line, what TV company is going to object to additional viewers ? (Of course, there are issues with things like film broadcast rights).
Certainly, personally, I’ve been watching British TV all my life. The first time I actually gave the BBC any money (which, incidentally, I was delighted to do) was when I bought the complete Yes Minister/Prime Minister off their own web site last weekend.
I don’t think so. The old BBC1 and ITV 405 line system was transmitted on VHF. Then BBC2 started which used UHF/625 lines. For a few years both systems ran in parallel . So a “duel standard” system would have been needed to receive all the available stations.
When RTE started a TV service in 1961 it chose the then-new 625-line standard. But many people living in the border area had already bought 405-line sets to receive BBC Northern Ireland transmissions, so they broadcast on 405-lines as well. Eventually the 405-line transmissions ceased in 1982, by which time there could have been few sets left capable of receiving them.
Both British broadcasters took a dim view of people who didn’t pay the licence fee receiving their programmes across the border, but apart from trying to shield the transmitter from radiating unnecessarily into the Republic there wasn’t much they could do about it. With a decent aerial (sometimes 60-ft) acceptable reception was possible across much of the Republic.
I remember being Ireland in the late 1960’s and many people in the Dublin / Wicklow area could receive BBC transmissions from (I think) transmitters in Wales. I seem to remember lots of tall aerial masts on the houses.
One reason could be to do with copyright agreements. When a British TV company buys in a TV series from (say) America one stipulation of the contract is that it can only be shown in the UK, because separate contracts and licensing agreements would have been sold to other countries. This is why you are not allowed to use a Sky viewing card in mainland Europe. Sky have only got the rights to show the programmes in the UK and Ireland.
On a vaguely related tangent, my parents live on the north coast of Devon, and on a clear day you can see the Welsh coast across the sea from their front room. They get a much stronger signal from the Welsh TV transmitter than they do from the English one (which is up and over the hill behind the town). Most of the programming is the same, but you get S4C, the Welsh version of Channel 4, which shows quite a lot of programmes in Welsh. I can particularly recommend Bob y Bildar.