What is the DTT blackout on February 14 and how to prepare your Android TV to have all the channels in HD

Although standard definition television should have said goodbye definitively last January 1, for different reasons the change to full HD DTT has been delayed. Now, there are no more delays that are worth it and on February 14 we will have the DTT blackout as we know it.

Next, let’s see what this DTT blackout is all about and how we can prepare our televisions with Android TV if we want to see all HD channels from the grill without having any problem.

What is the DTT blackout?

The first is the first: the resolution of our DTT is a disaster. While other countries have many high-resolution channels, in Spain we have had channels that broadcast, at most, at 720p for years.

Spanish Television has a 4K channel in tests that will expand soon, but it is an exception. The prevailing resolution is 720p or 1,080i which, depending on the type of content, looks worse than 720p.

And yes, there are still channels that broadcast in lower resolutions, the so-called SD. That will change this February 14since it will be the date on which SD channels will die forever and all the ones we have on DTT will have to have HD resolution.

This opens the doors to more FullHD or 4K channels (apart from TVE 4K, There are only 11 and they are paid), but it is most likely that we will continue to see the basic HD resolution, 720p. Having said that, If you currently watch HD channels, you won’t have to touch anything on your devicesince your television or your disk is prepared for it.

In some neighborhood communities it is possible that the antenna will have to be modified, but in the end, this major DTT blackout is summarized in that all the channels that currently broadcast in SD will have to be updated to HD resolution… or they will not appear on the antenna.

Prepare your Android TV before… and after the blackout

Now, on February 14 we will have to take some actions to have the channel list updated, and it is very simple if we have a television with Android TV.

If this is your case, The only thing you have to do is retune the channels. To do this, you must follow these steps:

• The first thing is to go to ‘Home’ and search for ‘Android TV Settings’.
• Once this is done, you have to look in ‘Channel configuration’ and click on ‘Digital configuration’. Next, we choose ‘Digital tuning’.
• Inside, we go to ‘Auto Tuning Frequency Range’ and choose the ‘Complete’ option to get all the available channels.
• The last step is to click on ‘Digital automatic tuning’.

If you have another operating system, the names will be different, but the steps are very similar. Once this is done, we now have the DTT channels where it belongs. Now, what if we don’t have an antenna and we use applications to watch DTT? We can always watch television through the Internet and there are several options here.

One of them is to download an application on your Android TV like DTT Channels. With it we have access to several general channels, but it is still not an optimal option if what you want to see is content from Atresmedia or Mediaset. To do this, you may want to download your own applications to the TV or have something like Photocall.tv.

These alternatives draw on live content that is accessible through the Internet, so they are completely legal. In fact, Photocall redirects us to the Atresmedia and Mediaset portals when we choose one of their channels.

On the other hand, you may not watch much DTT on your TV and what you always have on hand is your cell phone. As Android TV includes Chromecast, another option is to access one of these IPTV applications from your mobile and in