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British television broadcasting has a range of different broadcasters, broadcasting multiple channels over a variety of distribution media.Free-to-air analogue terrestrial broadcasters:
- The BBC is the oldest British broadcaster. Its analogue channels are BBC ONE and BBC TWO. The BBC first began a television service, initially serving London only, in 1936. BBC Television was closed during World War II but reopened immediately after.
- Independent Television (ITV) is the name given to the original commercial British television broadcasters, set up in 1955 to provide competition to the BBC. Its flagship analogue channel is ITV1
- Channel 4, and S4C in Wales, were launched in 1982.
- five (previously known as Channel 5) was the final analogue broadcaster to be launched, in 19971997 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year of the Reef''. Events January January 3 NBC's Today Show Bryant Gumbel signs off for the last time January 8 Mister Rogers receives a star on t. Its coverage is less than that of the other analogue broadcasters.
All of these channels are also carried on satellite televisionSatellite television is television delivered by way of orbiting communications satellites located 37,000 km (22,300 miles) above the earth's surface. The first satellite television signal was relayed from Europe to the Telstar satellite over North America, cable televisionCable television or Community Antenna Television CATV (and often shortened to 'cable') is a system of providing television, FM radio programming and other services to consumers through fixed coaxial cables, rather than by the older and more widespread rad and digital terrestrial televisionDigital Terrestrial Television DTTV or DTT is an implementation of Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) technology to provide a greater number of channels, and digital quality of sound and picture, through a conventional aerial instead of a satellite dish or services.
No further analogue broadcasters are expected to be launched, and efforts are being made to move analogue channels to digital television so that the bandwidth allocated to analogue television can be reused.
The major competitors to the old free-to-air analogue broadcasters are subscription-based services of the cable companies NTLNTL is a US listed company providing cable services. It is listed on the NYSE, but does the majority of its business in the UK and Ireland, but also has divisions in Europe, Australia and South East Asia. Company Structure The company is called NTL Group and Telewest, and the satellite broadcaster BSkyB. Digital terrestrial television was originally launched as a subscription-based service by a company called ONdigital, later ITV Digital, which failed commercially. The digital television service was relaunched as Freeview, a free-to-air service. A more limited package of subscription channels has since been added under the name Top Up TV.
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