BBC to supercharge HD line-up with five new channels in 2014

Five new BBC HD channels to go live
They'll be joining their colourful BBC Two HD friend

The BBC will continue its HD rollout by launching five new channels of super-sharp content, all subscription free.

The new channels - BBC News HD, BBC Three HD, BBC Four HD, CBeebies HD and CBBC HD - will be launched by early 2014, and you'll be able to feast on all of them assuming you have a digital television carrying HD channels. Because, you know, that would help.

The move comes after Ofcom announced it had awarded broadcast company Arqiva a licence that would allow for up to 10 new HD Freeview channels to be launched in the bandwidth freed after the digital switchover.

I can see clearly now

But that's not the only HD fun taking place in the next six months. The BBC said it will also launch regional variants of BBC One HD, while viewers in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales will get regional versions of BBC Two HD.

Just last week the BBC announced it was to cut the cord on 3D programming, following the decline in hype for the media. It seems that the nation know where the future of TV lies.

Meanwhile, the outlook for HD seems to only be getting brighter, with more than 50 per cent of British homes already HD enabled and that number expected to rapidly increase.

Hugh Langley

Hugh Langley is the ex-News Editor of TechRadar. He had written for many magazines and websites including Business Insider, The Telegraph, IGN, Gizmodo, Entrepreneur Magazine, WIRED (UK), TrustedReviews, Business Insider Australia, Business Insider India, Business Insider Singapore, Wareable, The Ambient and more.


Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider covering Google and Alphabet, and has the unfortunate distinction of accidentally linking the TechRadar homepage to a rival publication.