Most of them should be invisible to you but there are a couple of dates in particular to note.

There are a number of stages we’ll be working through in the next few weeks.

Turning to the technical changes involved, as I’m sure you can imagine, closing a transponder is not as simple as flicking a switch. We have exciting future plans for the BBC Red Button, as my colleague Tom Williams explains on the BBC Internet blog. And the BBC is committed to maintaining a vibrant and popular red button service.

I know that the BBC Red Button service as a whole is very appreciated and used by a wide section of the population, who value the ease of access to text and video at the press of a button. Accordingly, the BBC’s Delivering Quality First proposals in October 2011 set out a plan to reduce the number of BBC Red Button video streams on satellite and cable from five to one and save the costs of one transponder. In November 2010, the BBC Trust published its review of the BBC Red Button and challenged the BBC Executive “to reduce its distribution costs by providing a more consistent level of service across different digital TV platforms”. These changes will affect different people in different ways, and I know from reading your responses to my previous blogs that some of you take issue with the changes, so I wanted to explain the thinking behind the decisions as well as what will be happening from a technical standpoint. In order to carry these services on satellite we’ll be opening a new transponder (Astra 1N tp 61) which we will be referring to as DSat8. They will each be available on terrestrial, satellite and cable platforms.

Over the next few months we will be launching BBC One HD for the nations of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland.

This will mean we close our ‘DSat7’ transponder (Astra 2A tp 13).

In the middle of October we will be reducing the number of BBC Red Button video streams on satellite (and cable) to one.

This increased the capacity available to us and was the first of a number of modifications we are making to our satellite transmissions over the coming months to enable us to implement two key changes to our service line-up:

Just as the Paralympics kicked off at the start of September I wrote about a modification to our HD satellite transponder that I can happily report went ahead successfully as planned on 27 September 2012.

Bbc red button non hd