Have You Retuned Your Digi Box?

This week the UK's fifth and newest terrestrial television channel - Channel 5 released two new digital channels, Five US, and Five Life. As the name suggests Five US is devoted to showing only American programmes and films, and Five Life to chat, home, garden and lifestyle programmes (traditionally day-time TV). This 'specialising' of TV channels is an example of segmentation that has largely occurred in the UK since the onset of subscription and digital TV. The UK is set to become the world's first country to switch off analogue transmission of TV broadcasts, relying solely on digital signals, this will happen between 2008 and 2012, read more about it here.