Australian Analog TV Switch Off

[Legit-Design]

Many homes in small valleys were served by "pirate" repeaters, built over the years, and nobody had an exact number of them, so now they are not reached  by the DTV signal. The solution was to offer them a low cost satellite dish + receiver kit, and rebroadcast all DTV signal form satellite.

I have some receiver boxes (I bough one with money from the government), but they never worked as expected.
New TVs with integrated receivers work better, but a government regulation do not allow to rearrange channel order, so I have to scroll through tens of channels I'll never watch to reach the few I prefer.

How about using the internet to stream all tv channels to every house? Where I live some internet service providers used to (or still do) multicast stream freeview tv channels for every customer. Just fire up VLC and all is good to go. Multicast over wifi suffers some problems, but problems are usually solved. Capable hardware is now cheaper than ever, all needed is a Raspberry pi wifi dongle and access points which are wired up. As a bonus everyone gets internet.

[TheBay]

Analogue went off a while back in the UK, for years the manufacturers were coining in on this selling "Digital Ready" Aerials and what not, fooling people in to thinking their aerial needed to be replaced, their TV needed to be replaced etc.

Just like "CD Ready" on headphones in the 80's haha!

Digital TV is all about more revenue here, let's see how many channels we can fit on the multiplex with as little bit rate as possible, even the HD channels have taken a bitrate hit over the past few years.

Now there is a new money spinner, 4G mobile networks interfere with DVB-T/DVB-T2, so more aerials are sold and passive filters.
DAB is a waste of time, lesser audio quality than FM due to bit-rate on the majority of channels, everyone uses FM especially in vehicles.

Plus DAB is based on a well out of date codec.

[VK3DRB]

The old analogue test pattern was very useful. Aligning the CRT trace with a moving image was completely useless. I could not afford a test pattern generator, so I recorded the ABC test pattern at the end of transmission on video tape recorder and use it to align the geometry and convergence on colour TV sets.

Goodbye analogue.  (It is still better than digital in one respect - weak signals could be "decoded" by the human brain. With digital, you have no chance if the signal is not strong enough. Tough.)