I recall someone predicting two or three decades ago that the then current round of TV transmitter upgrades would probably be the last - the theory being that as phone lines were replaced with optical fibre, there would be plenty of bandwidth available for TV broadcasts and BT (as it was then) would be able to offer broadcasters a distribution medium far cheaper than maintaining a lot of steel towers and high power transmitters (as I recall my local one, Emley Moor, was approaching 1GW).

It's probably not panned out quite as expected (fibre to individual premises has taken longer, and there's probably a lot more going down it than expected) but I can still see it going in that direction. I fully agree that we'll loose a lot of resilience, which isn't a good thing, but as with VHS vs betamax - the system/market doesn't always seem to pick the best technical solution.

   - Andy.

as I recall my local one, Emley Moor, was approaching 1GW).
In terms of overall power cost, the internet usually works out more expensive, its just that it is on the users electricity bills, and probably would be switched on even while they also watch TV or listen to the radio as well.
This is because the megawatt transmitter serves a lot of users!
  Emley Moor is designed to cover roughly 1,5 million households many of which have more than one person, but in reality has a wider peripheral coverage, perhaps up to 2 or 3 million - but for the internet each house  has a steady load of perhaps a ten watts or so for a Wifi router, and the telco has something similar at their end of the fibre or copper line, hence the monthly bills from them.(and lets not talk about the power supplies to mobile phone masts)

It is very much not free or low energy, just how it is paid for is quite different, and that makes it look low energy.
Mike.

as I recall my local one, Emley Moor, was approaching 1GW).
In terms of overall power cost, the internet usually works out more expensive, its just that it is on the users electricity bills, and probably would be switched on even while they also watch TV or listen to the radio as well.
This is because the megawatt transmitter serves a lot of users!
  Emley Moor is designed to cover roughly 1,5 million households many of which have more than one person, but in reality has a wider peripheral coverage, perhaps up to 2 or 3 million - but for the internet each house  has a steady load of perhaps a ten watts or so for a Wifi router, and the telco has something similar at their end of the fibre or copper line, hence the monthly bills from them.(and lets not talk about the power supplies to mobile phone masts)

It is very much not free or low energy, just how it is paid for is quite different, and that makes it look low energy.
Mike.

It is very much not free or low energy, just how it is paid for is quite different

Very true. Although you might consider that if the consumer's internet devices are there anyway (for surfing, Alexa etc) then there's only a very modest increase in power for using it for TV as well.

    - Andy.

indeed - but ideally the network would go off when not in use, I know right now it doesn't but I can imagine as we become more aware of the fraction of our dwindling resources  devoted to moving binary representations of cute cats and so on that will be needed.

Mike

The power consumption of broadcast is a tricky subject - mainly because most determinations of energy usage ignores major components of the power consumption in receiving signals - like masthead amplifers (almost mandatory across many parts of the UK), the tuner power consumption (which is actually very significant) and the power consumption of STBs and hard disks for undertaking recording functionality. And this ignores the capital cost of maintaining a unique dedicated infrastructure for one service when the Internet can and does provide an infrastructure for ALL services.

Regardless however the driving factor is utility - and consumers have voted with their eyeballs.

The range of services that the Internet provides most households is for continuous service - so it is never off as it is always being used.

As for dwindling resources - I would not say wind and solar is dwindling - not yet anyway, give it a few billion years.

Emley Moor is one of 1154 UK transmitters for TV - one for every 60K people in the UK. So no, it is not the only transmitter for 1.5 million households, many others are needed to cover the gaps in coverage because of geography.