What you will find in the article
- Vodafone has reinstated Prima Krimi on its cable network in standard definition
- The SD version is primarily intended for blocks of flats with a cable replacement for the communal aerial
- Customers can now also watch Prima Krimi in Full HD
- Older set-top boxes and the Start package continue to use SD channels
Vodafone’s cable offering now includes the Prima Krimi channel in standard definition. Customers already had access to it in Full HD. “Yes, Prima Krimi in SD is now part of our cable service. This is a technical solution designed primarily for blocks of flats, where we provide a TV signal via the cable network as a replacement for reception from a communal TV aerial,” Vodafone spokesperson Lenka Do told MediaGuru.cz.
The channel thus mainly serves households that have a cable connection instead of a communal TV aerial and receive free-to-air channels via it. Vodafone had already removed the SD versions of the Nova and Prima groups’ thematic channels from its cable offering back in March 2024. As MediaGuru.cz reported at the time, only the main channels of both broadcasters remained in standard definition. The freed-up capacity in the cable network was utilised at the time by the new sports channel Sporty TV, which was replaced this year by Prima sport.
However, the SD versions have not disappeared entirely from Vodafone’s offering. They remain available on the ‘Start’ package, which customers can use, for example, on an additional television set in their home. Older set-top boxes, which are unable to handle high-definition images, were the main reason why Vodafone continued to broadcast the SD versions of the channels for so long.
“We still have several thousand old set-top boxes on our network that cannot handle HD resolution. They aren’t the primary devices, but they provide TV reception in places such as the kitchen and so on,” said Ondřej Luštinec, the spokesperson at the time, to MediaGuru in 2023. Both Nova and Prima broadcast their programmes via terrestrial transmission predominantly at a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels, so this quality is the standard under DVB-T2.
Source: mediaguru.cz