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If back in 1995, you had told people that every single channel, including re-broadcast Broadcast TV, in both the US and Canada would be "Scrambled" like HBO, Cinemax, Disney, and Showtime, requiring a cable box be present in every room, and that VCRs would be next to useless (you can still use a VCR, technically.) and that we would be paying $150+ in bills for it, we would be in outrage mode

Before '95, people EXPECTED to need a cable box on every TV, just because TV tuners didn't have a "cable" mode to tune in channels above 13.

You can't really fault cable companies for doing it too much, since DirecTV/DishNet get to encrypt all their local channels and force you to rent a box from them to watch... And works just as poorly with your VCR...

Not to mention that encryption across the board allows them to completely eliminate the installation step, which is an extremely common source of complaints and frustration from customers.

And complaining that your VCR doesn't work in 2014??? You might as well yell at the cashier at Wal-mart for not carrying blank 8-track tapes... You can't even BUY a VCR in stores today that has an ATSC/QAM tuner in it at all!

Complaining about your DVR not working would be a more reasonable complaint, but CableCard is an option available on Tivos and the like.

And frankly, it's ridiculous to pay for cable or satellite, when the overwhelming majority of people in the US can get a huge number of local broadcast channels, with content far better than those hundreds of cable channels, with just a modest antenna system, costing less than $200 up-front... Perhaps 3 months of cable/satellite subscription fees.

As a result, OTA is growing, especially with younger people:

"The number of households relying on OTA reception only is also growing, [...] Growth is especially strong amongst younger households,"

"One in five young households never bothered to get a TV subscription to begin with."

"Also, 28 percent of all households with a head of household under the age of 35 use an antenna instead of a pay-TV subscription."

http://www.tvtechnology.com/rf...

I honestly don't know what the big push for 4k displays really is. It all breaks down to the 'resolution' of your eye and the resolution of the screen. The human eye works based off of arcseconds for your vision. There are a few good charts out there that have the breakdown in a person with 20/20 vision's ability to distinguish between pixels on a display. I have a 60" 1080p tv and my couch is approximately 11 feet away. Assuming my vision was 20/20 (it isn't), in order for me to distinguish between pixels on a 4k display, the display would have to be over 120 inches corner-to-corner. Conversely, in order to distinguish the pixels on my 60" 1080p display requires me to sit closer than 4 feet to it. At that point, I'm moving my head to see everything, instead of just eyes going back and forth. HD was developed for you to sit about 3 x display height away from the screen. 4k allows you to sit closer before seeing the pixels, but do you really want to? Do you plan on sitting 3 feet away from your 60" display?
There's more discussion here.
What's the appeal of spending massive amounts of money on something that isn't visually distinguishable from something less than half the price?

Agreed - we have enough interference problems to work out among licensed broadcast television stations in the US already! The industry is still maximizing transmitter power and moving around antennas after the transition from analog to digital (I know a station finally moving on to Sutro Tower with their full-power DTV signal next week, for instance), and on a daily basis working out interference problems.

Even for non-co-channel interference, Intermodulation product problems in DTV receiver circuits abound for unlicensed transmissions in adjacent and second adjacent channels. If you want to understand these issues, check out Charlie Rhodes column in TV Technology.

If you want to set up an entire band for "cognitive radio", I'm sure that would work OK, but mixing licensed high-power and unlicensed low-power broadcasts in the same band is simply going to lead to interference.

There is a reason why whitespace data is being pushed on the broadcast TV bands rather than the military bands (where there is even more "white space").

How long before a hacker mods one of these to broadcast on frequencies that it should not be using?

This isn't the real problem, TV band Broadband Devices (TVBD) will cause problems as described in this article:

My experiments convince me that third-order distortion products generated by a triplet of strong broadband signals from nearby TVBD radiating 4 watts may cause loss of DTV reception on any of a large number of channels. This interference mechanism is not recognized by the FCC as a significant threat to DTV reception.

I think it is lunacy to try to share a "dumb broadcast" band with tens of millions unlicensed, uncoordinated agile devices because of all the intermodulation and distortion product issues (which we have to deal with already between existing DTV transmitters). You should have all dumb or all agile on a single band.

http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/68654 ----- Some of the comments of white space proponents:

        * "in a few years a second phase of the DTV transition should get TV off the air."
        * "Take TV off the air in a few years."
        * "over-the-air broadcasts should be replaced entirely by cable, satellite and Internet viewing."

Here's an interesting article that reveals the Whitespace Coalition's true goals: http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/68654

* "[i]n a few years a second phase of the DTV transition should get TV off the air."
* "Take TV off the air' in a few years."
* "[O]ver-the-air broadcasts should be replaced entirely by cable, satellite and Internet viewing."

The broadcasters also cited white space proponents' plans to increase their power levels over time. "The FCC proposes to limit devices to 40 milliwatts of power in white-space channels adjacent to TV stations, but 'we're going to push that up over time,'" the broadcasters quote one executive as saying. Mark McHenry, CEO of Shared Spectrum Co., said, according to the broadcasters, "The FCC is going to start conservatively, but we're going to wear them down. In a few years, we're going to be at 10 W all over the place." Of course, at these power levels, not only will free over-the-air TV reception be impossible in locations where WSDs are in use, but[b] cable TV reception will be impaired as well.[/b]

I've read that WUNJ is a translator for part of the PBS UNC network and they are "technically unable to separate Wilmington-specific DTV information from that going to the rest of the state", that is the real reason why it is remaining on the air in analog until February.

The FCC has been more lenient with non-commercial TV stations than commercial ones during the DTV transition.

There are a lot of analog translators that will have to remain on the air to cover rural areas even after February.

• The 50 million Americas who rely on analog OTA as a primary or backup medium are, over the next 13 months, expected to not just buy more equipment, but also to become RF experts and perform non-trivial antenna installations in order to continue watching the free television.
• The digerati can't fathom the burden this places on the rural housewife, the grandma in a retirement condo, the hispanic family living month-to-month, the apartment dwellers who can't install exterior antennas, the Wyoming rancher, and so on...

You did make one interesting point -- that some UHF stations will transition to VHF after the 2009 transition. This is true, but hardly sweeping. According to FCC DA-06-1082A2 (http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-06-1082A2.pdf), 262 stations will switch their DTV broadcasts from UHF to VHF on Feb 17, 2009. However, the final count of 482 VHF DTV stations will still be far less than the current count of 718 VHF NTSC stations.

It's also worth nothing that few DTV broadcasters use low-band VHF (channels 2-6) because of widespread reception problems (http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0001/t.1169.html). If that spectrum is mostly avoided by DTV anyway, what'd be the harm in assigning it for continued analog broadcasts?

That's sort of partially correct.

The way balanced audio works is via two signal conductors, and then a separate ground. That's probably the three wires that you're thinking of. Really the ground isn't part of the circuit (and sometimes the ground is intentionally broken to prevent loops), but it's why you have three pins in an XLR jack.

Basically, a balanced audio source will act like a 'push-pull' current source. Rather than simply having a voltage on a wire that varies in time, you have a continuous loop, and you 'push' down one side of the loop and 'pull' up on the other, or vice versa. If you were to hook an oscilloscope probe up to both sides of a balanced audio circuit while something was going down it, you'd find out that the signals on each side of the circuit are 180-degrees out of phase wrt each other. By convention, one of the signal lines is usually called the '+' side and one is called the '-' side,* with the '+' side usually being in-phase with the actual microphone input.

The advantage of this, over an unbalanced line, is common-mode rejection. If you use a transformer (or some type of modern transistorized circuit that simulates a transformer; op-amps acting like difference amplifiers also work well) on the receiving end of the circuit, you can basically 'throw away' any signal that's the same on *both sides* of the circuit. E.g., lets imagine that your balanced audio line is right next to a 60Hz power line. The 60Hz is going to get into the balanced line, but it's going to be the same on both the '+' and '-' sides, while the actual audio is going to be 180 degrees o.o.p. from one side to the other. This makes it easy to reject the interference: when you run the balanced audio into a 1:1 transformer, the 60Hz doesn't produce any current actually moving through the transformer's coils, and thus no output (or very little).

I'm not sure where balanced audio circuits originated. I think that it probably started with the phone company (which has been doing balanced loop circuits practically forever; in telco parlance the '+' and '-' are sometimes called 'tip' and 'ring' respectively, after their placement on old 1/4" jacks) and later migrated to studio audio and sound reinforcement later, rather than the other way around.

Some further reading on balanced audio:
http://www.videomaker.com/article/9732/ Good basic article, might make sense if my explanation doesn't.
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0071/t.1585.html Also good, assumes more knowledge of electrical concepts (i.e. impedance).

* Some audio people insist on calling the '+' side of balanced audio connections "hot" and the '-' side "cold," which I think is stupid since they both carry signal (unlike, say, the 'hot' and 'neutral' in your power socket), but you hear it tossed around.

The real problem with "whitespace" devices is intermodulation interference. Just because there isn't a signal in a "whitespace" doesn't mean that if you transmit there that your signal won't mix with other signals in receivers to create intermodulation noise.

Unlicensed signals on first adjacent channels next to DTV signals may generate third-order intermodulation product noise in DTV receivers.

There is nothing wrong with trying to set up "intelligent radio" unlicensed systems in their own band, but putting them adjacent to DTV channels is not a good idea.

More info:
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0072/t.1598.ht ml
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0072/t.2005.ht ml

The real problem with "whitespace" devices is intermodulation interference. Just because there isn't a signal in a "whitespace" doesn't mean that if you transmit there that your signal won't mix with other signals in receivers to create intermodulation noise.

Unlicensed signals on first adjacent channels next to DTV signals may generate third-order intermodulation product noise in DTV receivers.

There is nothing wrong with trying to set up "intelligent radio" unlicensed systems in their own band, but putting them adjacent to DTV channels is not a good idea.

More info:
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0072/t.1598.ht ml
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0072/t.2005.ht ml

And there's not much to be found, but tv technology website has a little more info in this article.

10% is Huge?!? for a product that has been on the market for at least five years, and had a mandate that local television would switch to DTV (of which HDTV is a subset) in 2002, then 2006, and now 2009, 10% is mediocre.

http://www.tvtechnology.com/features/regulatory-re view/f-bu-dtv.shtml

http://www.dtv.gov/consumercorner.html#whatisdate

Interlaced and progressive scan displays are not directly comparable. See Why Do We Interlace?. Using the numbers in that article, 1080i is equivalent to 648p. That's why many people prefer 720p to 1080i. There's no free lunch.

According to this article, more than 1,000,000,000 watched the last Super Bowl. So unless, you're comparing 64 games to 1 game (which is beyond stupid), I doubt that the World Cup Final will have even 50% more viewers than the Super Bowl, which is pretty amazing considering that the Super Bowl is played almost completely by Americans.

According to this article, about 130 million US viewers watched the 2006 Super Bowl. The Worldwide figure is about 1 billion (or, as you would put it: 1,000,000,000). Not bad for a sport that's played at a high-level professionally in only 4 countries (and even in the European countries, played primarily by Americans).

I agree with the Masked Engineer. Don't have a hard date, merely print "a label on every single device with an analog TV tuner explaining to consumers that there will come a day when that tuner will cease to function and an 'adapter' will be needed at extra cost."

That puts the consumer on notice and allows broadcasters to make the switch when they're ready. If they're ready sooner, the consumers were warned. If it's later, it's later.

http://www.tvtechnology.com/features/Masked-Engine er/f_mario_orazio-09.21.05.shtml

...the parent is correct, millions still use OTA analog TV with rabbit ears or external antennas in the US. It's a huge number still, estimates are 13 million to 22 million households down in this url.

http://www.tvtechnology.com/dailynews/issue.php?w= 2005-05-27

Well, me and the other owners of those 33 million TVs might just give a hoot. Not everyone [wants|can afford] cable or dish service, y'know.

Lets see, 33 million? That's a lot of people when you think about it. New York state only has 19.1 million people in it. 33 million is more than the population of most states.

Just how much will I need to spend in order to keep watching TV once they ram this through?

Depends on how much a D/A downconverter box costs at that point. At Best Buy the Funai ATSC/HDTV Receiver with Indoor Antenna will recieve H/DTV (HDTV and SDTV) and convert them to analog ouputs. Cost? $229. It's still a little bit more than you need for your current TV as it will output DVI (although if you have an LCD monitor you can watch it on there).

The CEA (or at least some of its members) have been asking congress for a hard cut off date for when analog will be shut down. They then will start about 12-18 months prior to that date mass producing D/A converter boxes. They expect that they can produce them for sale for somewhere between $50-$80. Specific numbers I have read about are $50 and $66.

I suggest reading TV Technology as they cover the issue quite frequently.

Disclaimer: I work at a TV Network.

As soon as congress sets a mandatory date for a switch to digital (and thus killing analog), the people who make Digital/Analog converters will know when the market will be in place. They then plan on having $50-$80 converters en mass on the market by that date. Until they have a firm date, they don't know when there will be a market for the D/A converters (as people can still tune to the analog).

You won't need a "free converter" if the manufacturers would integrate the receivers into the TVs and that's exactly what the FCC is mandating. I never did understand why companies don't provide the product people want - half the people with "wide screen" think they're getting HDTV. Oh that's why - they can sell a cheaper product and people will *think* it's what they want.

Bundling a DTV reciever into any tv currently ups the price by at least $100. So take to HDTVs that are identical in any way excpet one doesn't have hte built in reciever. The one with the reciever will cost at least $100 more. There are reasons to not have the converter in the TV.

A) You use cable/satelite/other only and no OTA (Over the Air)
B) The external recievers you can buy are usually superior to the ones that come bundled in the TVs (better at handling multipat/impulse noise/decoding)

As for broadcaster take on this? Most of them would love to be able to shut down the analog transmitter. It costs them well over $10K a month to power a single transmitter. Then there are other equipment issues and the infrastructure necessary to support it. One station even requested it be able to hand over it's analog channel early and was denide by the FCC (crazy world we live in).

Read TV Technolgy. It covers a lot of these issues.

Here's one article on the D/A boxes
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=+site%3At vtechnology.com+congress+box&btnG=Search

As soon as congress sets a mandatory date for a switch to digital (and thus killing analog), the people who make Digital/Analog converters will know when the market will be in place. They then plan on having $50-$80 converters en mass on the market by that date. Until they have a firm date, they don't know when there will be a market for the D/A converters (as people can still tune to the analog).

You won't need a "free converter" if the manufacturers would integrate the receivers into the TVs and that's exactly what the FCC is mandating. I never did understand why companies don't provide the product people want - half the people with "wide screen" think they're getting HDTV. Oh that's why - they can sell a cheaper product and people will *think* it's what they want.

Bundling a DTV reciever into any tv currently ups the price by at least $100. So take to HDTVs that are identical in any way excpet one doesn't have hte built in reciever. The one with the reciever will cost at least $100 more. There are reasons to not have the converter in the TV.

A) You use cable/satelite/other only and no OTA (Over the Air)
B) The external recievers you can buy are usually superior to the ones that come bundled in the TVs (better at handling multipat/impulse noise/decoding)

As for broadcaster take on this? Most of them would love to be able to shut down the analog transmitter. It costs them well over $10K a month to power a single transmitter. Then there are other equipment issues and the infrastructure necessary to support it. One station even requested it be able to hand over it's analog channel early and was denide by the FCC (crazy world we live in).

Read TV Technolgy. It covers a lot of these issues.

Here's one article on the D/A boxes
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=+site%3At vtechnology.com+congress+box&btnG=Search

Would such a system be more open to being hacked? There are reports that the outlawed Falun Gong religion hijacked a satellite and there's the Captain Midnight HBO escapade. So theoretically how open to attack would such systems be? I'm not well versed in missle systems but I've always understood chain of command and redundancy in personell kept a Dr. Strangelove type scenario from developing. Would this be the case with weapons in space probably reliant on satellite systems?

That's slightly misleading. During the transition, TV stations are having their spectrum doubled by allocating a second unused UHF channel for the new digital signal.

Once the plug gets pulled on Analog, the licensee has the option to keep the digital station where it is or to move the digital signal to the old frequency and release the temporary digital chanel. At the end of the process, bandwidth consumption returns to what it was prior to the conversion.

The difference is that the Licensee at that point has a channel capable of carrying a single HDTV signal or up to 6 multicast channels with quality similar to today's NTSC (except it will be digital and with dolby sound). In addition, the station may choose to use that bandwidth for other digital services, which will probably be a significant revenue source.

Back in February, the stations had to state their intentions on which channel they will return to the FCC.

Here is a great writeup on the results at:
http://www.tvtechnology.com/features/On-RF/F_Lung- 04.06.05.shtml

The quick summary is that those stations on low VHF (channels 2-6) will probably stay on their ditital channel. Those on channels 7-13 mostly want to move the digital station(s) back to their original analog frequency.

Digital ATSC does not work well on the low UHF band due to differences in propogation (2-6 is below the FM radio band, 7-13 is just above it)

There is technically no buffer between bands. What there is is a requirement for how many DB your band must be below by the time it reaches the edge of your band. This has mainly to do with RF filter evolution than anything else. For DTV, the FCC made it possible to have adjacent channels. This wasn't possible with analogue and the old transmitters. With the new tech, they are putting adjacent channels in cities, but they still need spacing since you can't have the same channels used in two adjacent cities. They have also had other problems occur, such as chronicalled here:
http://www.tvtechnology.com/features/On-RF/Low_Ban dVHF.shtml
And the problems that occur because the FCC has allowed low power transmission in areas with out keeping a list of what they are used for as shown here:
http://www.fedele.com/website/tvt/tv040698.txt

what parent is talking about is this.

Gates Faces Down Blue Screen of Death

yep. it happened AGAIN

or about 1hr13 into the clip from parent's blog

I wonder why they do not paint fluorescent tube with a yellowish hue to make them warmer. I bet if they would do this, they would conquer a greater market.

Compact Fluorescent bulbs come in colour temperatures from 2700-6500K. Higher colour temperatures equal "cooler" light with more blue.

Check these links for an explanation:

* http://www.tvtechnology.com/features/Tech-Corner/f -rh-white.shtml
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White

I started using CF bulbs a few years ago simply b/c of the geek factor. I've found that quality varies and few remain bright throughout their entire useful life. Some run hotter than others. Also found that different rooms / applications call for different colours. YMMV.

Replying to myself again. I found a rant about aspect ratios (He even admits it's a rant). I was wrong, apparently 16:9 was choosen because of backwards compatibility with old lenses and equipment, or something. It's a little hard to follow.

I was referring to going 720p 16x9. It looks as if they are going to be the first with significant amounts of native HD instead of up-rezzed SD.

Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.

Actually, movies are run at twice that, i.e. in order to reduce the flickering each frame is projected twice. And 48Hz is just barely acceptable for straight on viewing. You'll see the flicker clearly out of the corner of your eye.

So, they actually need more than that, 72Hz is actually about right for something that you're sitting close to (such as a computer screen).

There's a lot of info on the net if you want to dig deeper.

Yes, they do it with songs as well as commercials, but IMO they are worse about it with commercials. (Television commercials are really bad about it, and it's especially annoying during quiet shows like X Files, where you have to turn the sound up to follow the conversations.)

Even the FCC chairman admits that the "transition is failing". Further more he says:"The timelines we set out for success are unrealistic," he said. "When we go back and look at the deployment of other killer consumer products and services, nothing moves on a transitional timeframe like this one is expected to.".