U.K. House of Lords Suggests Moving TV to Online

LONDON: A House of Lords committee has recommended that television services in the U.K. should be broadcast over the Internet in a bid to free up more bandwidth for other uses.

The report from the Select Committee on Communications, entitled Broadband for All: An Alternative Vision, states: "It is likely that IPTV services will become ever more widespread, and eventually the case for transferring the carriage of broadcast content, including public service broadcasting, from spectrum to the Internet altogether will become overwhelming. This may well be a more sensible arrangement, as spectrum is perfectly suited to mobile applications."

The report recommends that the British government, Ofcom and the industry consider switching terrestrial TV content online and goes on to explore the consequences of what the freed-up spectrum could mean. The committee says that using such airwaves on TV could be considered "wasteful" and the spectrum may be better suited to mobile.

The report comes months after a large portion of the U.K.’s 26 million TV households switched from analogue to digital (the Northeast and Northern Ireland are due to complete the process by the end of October). The committee suggests that a date for a second switchover would be a ways off, but that planning should start now.

"People will perhaps feel fed up, but going from analogue to digital may not be the whole journey," said committee chair Lord Inglewood. "Now we are finding we may go from digital to Internet."

The report concludes: "We recommend that consideration should be given over time by the Government, Ofcom and the industry as to when and under what conditions fibre switchover would be appropriate and what implications it would have."