After the shifting of frequencies on MUXes in Northern Italy in February, March opens with new changes for three regional broadcasters that transmit on digital terrestrial.
From North to South, the dance of frequencies and channel shifts continues for national and local broadcasters that transmit on digital terrestrial, but also for their viewers, who in this period are often forced to retune their TVs or decoders to continue to watch their favorite programs.
In mid-February it was the turn of the HSE package, at national level, the following week there were changes to Mux Quenza 1, Quenza 2 and Telelibertà in Lombardy, Emilia Romagna, Veneto, Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta and at the end of February it was the turn of Mux Studio 1 again in Piedmont, Lombardy, Emilia Romagna, Veneto and Valle d'Aosta. Now, instead, Antenna Sicilia, Telecolor and Video Mediterraneo are changing frequencies and broadcasting in Sicily within the Mux Antenna Sicilia, Sicilia Channel, TCI, Mediterraneo 1, Onda TV, CTS, Tele Video Agrigento and Video Sicilia.
The three Sicilian broadcasters have already warned their viewers: to continue to see them it is necessary to retune. Video Mediterraneo has already changed frequencies yesterday, March 1st, while Antenna Sicilia and Telecolor (which belong to the same publisher of the newspaper La Sicilia) will do so on March 6th.
After the retuning, if everything goes well, viewers will be able to continue to see Antenna Sicilia, Video Mediterraneo and Telecolor at the same LCNs as before: 10, 11 and 12. What changes, however, are only the frequencies of the three standard resolution channels, while nothing changes at the moment for the three respective HD channels.
Digital terrestrial: the next steps
Frequency shifts will continue throughout 2021: in fact, they are necessary to free up the 700 MHz band that has already been assigned to telephone operators for the 5G network.
This purely practical phase, which requires simple retuning of the decoder or TV, will be followed by other more technical phases that may make it necessary to change the TV system. On September 1st there will be the abandonment of MPEG-2 coding in favor of MPEG-4, while in June 2022 the transformation of Italian television will be completed with the definitive passage to the DVB-T2 standard.