Only two months after shutting down nine TV stations “because of lack of space on the spectrum”, the Ministry in charge of TV’s has announced they’ll allow five new TV stations to open up.
But, and this is fun, it means every TV set in Spain is going to have to be reprogrammed, or you won’t get a signal.
sigh.
Both TV’s and mobile phones use radio waves. To prevent intereference, radio waves are split into “spectrums”. And in order to have a unified EU coverage for 4G mobile phones (the next generation of phones which are coming), the TV signals in Spain all have to be bunched up a bit.
Since everything is being rearranged, the government has gone the whole hog, jammed everything up, freed up some space reserved for the National Good and will auction off five new TV slots to the highest bidders. (Or best friends).
What this means is that your current TDT box will be obsolete. You either buy a new one, or get the current one updated. The Ministry reckons a charge of about 20€ is to be expected if you live in a block of flats (that’s per flat), but admits that for single use installations (ie, your house) it could be considerably more. The change is expected in Spring 2015, just before the elections, and a massive advertising campaign will launch once everyone is sure what’s going to happen.