Dear Sir/Madam,

There has been a great deal of confusion regarding digital TV, particularly with regard to what particular future service will actually be the replacement for analogue TT when it gets switched off:  Will it be:
    1)    The current DTT Freeview service
    2)    Some form of free satellite service as recently mooted by the BBC
    3)    A non-susbscription commercially hosted service such as recently announced by BSkyB, which, incidentally, doesn't actually seem to be a genuinely new service at all, so should be arousing the interest of the ASA.

This lack of clarity makes it very difficult for manufacturers to produce properly debugged and functioning kit, and very difficult for consumers like myself to know what to invest in.  For example, I bought a Pace Twin, and it has proved a great disappointment in that it is very buggy, can't record from external analogue sources, and can't receive the DTT TopUpTV service.

It is imperative that this confusion is removed ASAP.  My own preferences are:

1)    I don't care whether the service is hosted via DTT or via satellite as long as
        a)    Its future is guaranteed
        b)    It is genuinely free (excepting the licence fee or its future equivalent and the cost of the receiving equipment)
        c)    It is transmitted unencrypted
        d)    It follows open DVB standards such as DVB-SI (for the EPG) and DVDB-TXT (for teletext) and not some non-competitive commercial bespoke service requiring special equipment to receive it such as the current non-subscription FreeSat service from BSkyB or its recently announced rebadging of same.

2)    While I understand the short-term necessity to replace other services that went bankrupt and left their customers in the lurch, I don't want the public service BBC to be in long-term commercial partnership with an commercial monopoly such as BSkyB.

3)    With regard to paying for additional services such as TopUpTV, I want to be able to add them on a realistically priced per channel basis, not have to pay over the odds  to receive one channel I want and twenty or so I don't.

4)    Further on the subject of funding, in principle, I want the licence fee system to be retained, but I am concerned that while previously it seemed to guarantee quality from the BBC, recently there has been a worrying decline in standards, particularly on BBC2 whose raison d'etre, I understood from the time of its bandwidth allocation and since, was to be a home for 'alternative' programming, not the junk that largely fills it today: unfunny sitcom repeats, irrelevant lifestyle programming, unrealistic drama soaps, inappropriate sports, etc, that we've spent our lives trying to avoid on other channels.

A while ago, the following was on BBC2 between 1700 and midnight over the course of a week or so:  Some Mothers Do Have 'Em, Flog It!, As Time Goes By, Delia's How To Cook, Escape To The Country, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, Boxing, Weakest Link, What Not To Wear, Can't Take It With You, As Time Goes By, three gardening programs in a row, X Files.

Hardly the channel that bought us:  The original B&W Forsyte Saga, first class dramatisations of many of the Hardy novels,  Sartre's 'The Roads To Freedom', Kenneth Clark's 'Civilisation', Bronovsky's 'The Ascent Of Man', Galbraith's 'The Age Of Uncertainty', all the Attenborough wildlife series, Ski Sunday in the days when it actually showed breathtaking Alpine Ski racing and didn't waste most of its time on ski holiday lifestyle, French and German news broadcasts in their original langauges, etc.

I have always looked to the licence fee system to enable the BBC to produce programming with minority and/or higher intellectual content. However, it seems the system is now failing in this respect. Any replacement funding scheme must guarantee that at least one 24hr channel has adequate intellectual and alternative content.

Regards,

Charles Harrison.