Oxford Aerials have been fitting TV aerials and satellite dishes in and around Oxfordshire and the surrounding counties for decades and in days gone by every house that had a TV (which was nearly everyone) had an aerial. Oxford Aerials certainly fitted more aerials in Oxfordshire than any other company. But now things are changing.
As we all know, much of the countries’ TV viewing can be delivered from signals over the internet and as well as delivering the streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, the traditional broadcast channels can also now be received in this way as well. We estimate that on an estate of new houses, less than half of the houses will now have an aerial fitted.
Whether to you want to receive your TV viewing via an aerial, the internet or from both is totally a matter of personal choice. Some viewers (typically older people), still use only broadcast TV from an aerial, watching BBC, ITV, channel 4 and all the rest of the UK TV channels and recording the programs on a Freeview recorder that they want to watch later. Some viewers (typically younger people) only use the streaming services, watching only Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney and Paramount etc and ignoring the traditional services, but most viewers still watch a mix of both, using streaming services for movies and mini-series etc, but using the traditional broadcast channels to catch the news and daily magazine programs.
But the shift is only in one direction and because of that, many houses now have aerials from previous owners which are no longer used by the current occupiers. Oxford Aerials are being asked increasingly to remove old aerials which are now redundant. Our estimate is that about a third of the time that an aerial falls down because of corroded metalwork the customer will ask us to remove it rather than to repair or replace it. Oxford Aerials makes sure that the old metals and electronic parts are properly re-cycled and don’t end up in land fill. We have a waste carriers’ licence.
There is a political debate about when the UK broadcast network should be turned off altogether and the nation would then be forced to use only internet TV. On one hand, there is a need to re-use the TV (UHF) frequency space for future mobile
phone signals which are used increasingly and on the other hand there is a desire to not frustrate older TV viewers who have no desire to have to find all of their favourite channels by fishing through I-Player, ITVX and the UK TV app. To have to do this every time then want to change channels would be frustrating. There is also a slight national security issue because the transmitter network is totally in UK government hands and is less vulnerable to interference from outside agitators and terrorists.
In Switzerland, terrestrial broadcast TV has been turned off completely, but it is still possible to get the ‘terrestrial’ channels there from satellite TV which will feel like a similar experience for viewers. In the UK, we have Freesat which offers the same channels as a terrestrial aerial but from a Satellite dish; this could be used by older viewers as an alternative to signals from an aerial. There is a similar debate about how long this service should carry for as well because there is obviously a cost to the broadcasters to rent frequency space on the satellite and as for terrestrial viewing, the numbers of viewers is falling.
For Oxford Aerials the work that we do is changing, with a drift from simply providing every house with an aerial to a more complex set of situations. Sometimes we will supply and fit an aerial, sometimes we will remove an old aerial and set up a customers TV to the internet, sometimes we will supply and fit a dish so that a customer can use Freesat as an alternative to an aerial and sometimes we will improve a customers Wi-Fi in their TV viewing room so that their internet TV works without it buffering.
Whatever happens, we will be helping our customers to get perfect quality seamless viewing regardless of the source.
