Let the silver surfers keep on flicking through the channels
THE OTHER day I was faffing about with my Netflix channel, pressed the wrong button and landed on a television station. I know. Radical.
Some sort of lifestyle programme was airing, on a channel whose name I’d never come across before. I flicked the remote to another station, then another, realising I had hundreds of TV channels that I have never got around to watching. Ever.
My first thought – well actually it was my second, my first thought was that I better get on to Virgin and change my ludicrous, hundredsof-channels-I-never-watch package – was, who watches this stuff?
It’s certainly true that more of us access TV through the internet than ever before. The television in this house only goes on at weekends, and usually then only to access a film or drama series on Netflix or iPlayer on a Saturday night (yes, we are real partygoers).
The rest of the week we tend to watch things on our devices, which means that at the moment I’m working my way through The Gilded Age on Amazon Prime (a glorious romp through late 19th century Manhattan written by Julian Fellowes, think Downton Abbey with American accents and more frills) on my laptop, while my husband is partial to the odd football match.
Many people I know are the same. They watch what they watch, when they want to watch it, on the device of their choosing. My Mum, despite growing up in an era long before streamers or the internet, now prefers watching Netflix and iPlayer on her iPad, than switching on the live channels she can access on the box in the corner of her room.
Many of us now only watch the news on terrestrial television, and perhaps the odd event such as the Coronation, or the Queen’s funeral, or live sport you don’t have to pay for, such as Wimbledon.
And yet there are still almost four million people in Britain today who rely solely on digital terrestrial television. They are predominantly older and less affluent. And for them it is a lifeline. They watch daytime TV, they watch the news when it’s on, and they watch their favourite soaps and dramas. It’s TV how it used to be watched.
All of which is why the news this week, that broadcasters have hinted all channels may soon be received through the internet rather than via aerial, is so concerning.
Ofcom said TV companies have told them ‘for the first time’ they are expecting to axe channels from digital television. It’s a worrying move, particularly for those 3.9million who cannot access TV any other way.
For the elderly, particularly those who live on their own, the television is a friend, and a companion. It can alleviate loneliness, and keep them plugged into the outside world. They don’t want to mess about with devices they don’t understand, or plunge into the world of expensive and confusing streaming platforms that don’t, it turns out, have their favourite programme on anyway.
The report states that there is widespread concern that ‘some may never transition’ to internet TV, and frankly, why should they?
LOOK, I understand that times change. The report suggested that the viewing of scheduled channels through digital terrestrial television is forecast to drop from 62 per cent of viewing of programmes in 2023 to 22 per cent by 2040. That also means over the next 16 years, a lot of Brits will still be relying on digital terrestrial TV.
The move to switch off channels on digital terrestrial then, seems both wrong-headed and too soon. Not everyone has an iPad or access to Netflix. They either don’t want it or can’t afford it. For those people, is it not worth keeping those channels switched on a little bit longer?