There will be no HD broadcasts this year from RTL Nederland, CEO Bert Habets told delegates at the Nieuwe TV Kijken congress in Amsterdam. But the broadcaster hopes to roll out its RTL Gemist catch-up TV service on a number of platforms this year. At the moment, it is only available on the small fibre-to-the-home network run by Lijbrandt Telecom on an experimental basis.
The Dutch public broadcasters still have plans to launch HD versions of the three national channels Nederland 1, 2 and 3, but as yet there is no timetable. Originally, a launch was foreseen for Q1, 2009, but due to “technical issues” this date has now been postponed for an indefinite period.
SBS Broadcasting is working on an HD version of its Net5 channel. Most of the programming on Net 5 consists of movies and TV series that are already available in high def making it relatively simple to simulcast in HD. But the broadcaster has not confirmed this nor published a date when it will start HD broadcasts.
