Crave Talk: One megapixel, and nothing's on

High-definition TV is glorious. It looks great, is getting to be affordable and if you haven't got it, you want it. But it may also kill decent telly in the UK -- and that's a price that will be harder to pay.

This all boils down to the gloriously British contradictions built into the dear old BBC. It's pretty much the best public-service broadcaster in the world and prides itself on delivering tonnes of programming free to air.

Yet 'free-to-air TV' is an odd term. It sounds like it means you can get free TV just by picking it up from the air, but that's never been true in the UK -- you've always had to have a TV licence, even if you never watch the stations it pays for, and you've always had to pay for your own gear.

What's even odder is that, although there's always been a level of grumbling about the TV licence, there's never been a sense that it's generally unfair. In detail, yes -- it's a flat-rate poll tax, which is only fair in the sense that the law will treat a penniless single mother identically to the boss of Dixons when it comes to throwing either in jail for non-payment -- but the average Brit, sensitive as a seismograph to being ripped off, finds the BBC a fair bargain.

Well-funded public-service broadcasting is worth having. In many countries, public-service TV and radio are poor cousins to the commercial stations, a dreary selection of worthy programming seen as a retreat for intellectuals and kooks. In the UK, the BBC keeps everyone on their toes, competing head-on for eyeballs with popular programmes while keeping the weirdos happy at the same time. It's a contender, but only because everyone can get it.

The BBC has also been a major driving force behind the Freeview digital TV roll-out, in which we're world leaders. It's a very British way of doing things -- have an independent state broadcaster that is willing to go along with the Government and drag the viewers with it, with nobody asking too many questions. But it works: as a nation we're way ahead of the curve on digital deployment.

Freeview has been successful because it's an easy sell to people who don't want to pay an extra subscription for TV -- another side-effect of public-service broadcasting. But you can't put HD on Freeview, and there's nowhere else for it to go and be free to air. For the first time, there's simply no way for the BBC to keep up with cable and satellite.

The danger is that HD-less Freeview will ghettoise public service broadcasting in the UK. Cable and satellite programming so far hasn't done it, because it's either poor quality, very expensive or too minority interest to matter.

HD is different: if you can afford it, you'll want it no matter what you watch. And you can't get it from the BBC. There has to be free-to-air HD in this country, or HD will be used to prise us away from the free-to-air principle as a whole -- something Sky, which hates the BBC, is already slavering to make happen. A transmission channel not beholden to the BBC's competitors is required.

There isn't the bandwidth on Freeview now, and it may be too expensive even after the analogue switch-off. Other frequencies aren't suitable. At some point wireless data networking will be ubiquitous, fast and cheap enough to carry HD TV along with anything else you want, but not for another ten years at least.

The only solution is DSL. It's got the coverage, it's got the speed, it comes with broadband Internet access and free interactivity. Running the core network is expensive, but that's true of whatever transmission medium the BBC is using. People who don't subscribe to pay TV are happy to pay for Net access because you get so much more. For HD, you'll need at least 4 and preferably 8Mbps, but that's close to entry level these days. It can be done, given the will.

So this is the gadget that can save the BBC: a Freeview DSL box. Plug it into your phone socket and your TV, and it'll do what Freeview does now. Plug it into an HD Ready TV, and it'll do that too. Other broadcasters will want it -- after all, it'll do interactive advertising a thousand times better than satellite so they'll help pay for the infrastructure, the same as they have with digital terrestrial. It will also mark the adoption of the Internet as a true public-service medium, which is in its blood.

Yes, free-to-air public-service broadcasting sits uncomfortably alongside the free market. But we know it works, even if it doesn't fit any particular dogma. We have to make sure it keeps working -- and given the British taste for workable contradiction, all we need to do is say that we want it. -Rupert Goodwins