BBC HD Service
The BBC has been approved to provide a service of about eleven hours per day, from around 14:00 to the early hours, with some flexibility to extend beyond this to allow for the coverage of significant live sport or other events. The BBC Trust stated that the service should be available on cable and satellite as soon as the service licence was effective, and the channel had its official launch on 1 December 2007. The decision to provide an early Freeview four-hour overnight schedule has been put on hold with the preferred option being to provide the full nine-hour service as soon as possible; this would be reviewed in spring 2008 when there would be greater clarity over spectrum bandwidth and broadcast standards for digital television.
The BBC HD channel is a mixed-genre service. Its aim, as far as possible, is to showcase programmes produced in HD from the schedules of other BBC channels. These are broadcast in HD end-to-end, not converted from standard definition (SD). Any individual programme may contain up to 25 per cent of non-HD material converted from SD—for example, archive shots in a documentary. Some high definition recording formats like HDV as well as some film formats like 16 mm are considered by BBC to be "non-HD".
The content comes from across the BBC's portfolio of television channels. It was found by the BBC Trust from the PVT that there was considerable support for BBC HD to show programmes in prime time that would most benefit from the uplift to HD, and not to be just a channel that would simulcast BBC One programmes at this time.
On 28 May 2010, it was announced that BBC HD Channel will extend its regular broadcast hours from around nine hours a day to twelve. The announcement coincided with that of BBC One HD, a high definition simulcast of BBC One, which began transmitting on 3 November 2010. This leaves the separate BBC HD channel to showcase the rest of the BBC.
While the channel is off-air, the BBC broadcasts the BBC HD Preview, which shows clips of programmes featured on the channel as a means of self-promotion for the service. These clips are interspersed with the BBC HD ident and the tuning signal Test Card X and BLITS, which test the picture quality and position and the quality of surround sound respectively.
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