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FCC Wading Into Digital TV Quagmire
Carnage4Life writes "The FCC is beginning to get impatient with the cable TV industry and television manufacturers for not getting digital TV out to consumers more quickly. In an interesting speech delivered at the CES on Friday the FCC chairman explains that the FCC is reluctant to dictate standards to the industry but will do so if no consensus on standards is reached by April."
no YOU are confusing HDTV and DTV and DIGITIZED NTSC. A digitized NTSC signal is all you can get on cable in north america right now. Hell it is all you can get on sat. systems here also (with the exception of DirecTV Plus and an RCA DTC-100 reciever and even that only gets you 1 HBO and 1 PPV in DTV/HDTV quality. BTW - The difference between DTV and HDTV is apect ratio, that is it. a 4X3 DTV can still recieve HDTV broadcasts letterboxed... As for all of you moaning that you have to buy a new TV ... errrrr wrong... you need to buy a new tuner... hell you can buy them right now for as low as $200.00 and that will go DOWN way down...
No, it doesn't. I have digital cable and I can tell you that on a decent TV (like one with component video in) DTV looks horrid. Like the image is compressed into MPEG-1. I can clearly see artifacts all over the image. This is price you pay for having 200+ channels.
As far as image quality, DTV is certainly not a step up.
The discussion is not about cable - it's about local, broadcast television going digital. The comment about the cable plant upgrades is also inaccurate - YOU will foot the cost of the upgrades, NOT the company.
Half the fun is deducing that it's fake.
Hm, perhaps they will...
I had a play with one of the truly integrated digital sets the other day in Curry's (big electrical retailer in the UK). It was a Sony WEGA widescreen with a 100hz's refresh rate and an integrated Digital Tuner, with Dolby Prologic etc, I managed to get the following channels: -
:)
:)
BBC1, BBC2, BBC Knowledge, BBC Choice, BBC News24, BBC Parliament and ITV, ITV2, Chan4, Chan5. (Might have been more)
These are just the free 10 channels (apart from the license of course) the set can pick up with the internal tuner without an extra box, much like the same way the old sets pick up the 5 analogue channels.
The picture on the digital channels was perfect, I've always liked the Trinitron stuff but this was really impressive, and out of a wall of 50 TV's, you were really drawn to this one, the picture was sharp without any flicker and the colours were extremely vibrant. The screen was totally flat too, even though it still uses a CRT. The set was capable of firmware updates too, very clever
It was interested to see how it handled the old 4:3 format since it was a 16:9 tube, anyway I found an old documentary on channel4 which was obviously filmed some years ago in 4:3, the TV went into "Widescreen (smart)", I think it cropped the original picture and zoomed in a little, it was quite impressive how it handled the old stuff, much better than just adding unsightly borders.
This was the first set which left me impressed with a visible improvement over the old system, rather than the offer of 30 channels of Digital Crap rather than my current 20 channels of analogue crap. I've always been left luke warm with the analogue widescreen + "digital" set-top box solution, the TV's seem to just stretch pictures and apart from the transmission being in digital the TV didn't seem all that "Digital" but rather a mish-mash of old and new.
I think I may invest in one when I find £1600 lying around
As for previous format changes in the UK, we went from 400 line Black and White to 650 line Colour, that was the only change, hmm, and now digital of course. Digital only really got the go ahead in the UK because the BBC can invest a whole load of cash into new systems without having to be accountable to share holders or worry about making unwise commercial decisions, it's a classic chicken and the egg situation otherwise, manufacturers wont make TV's and people wont buy them unless there's content.
If you follow that "kill the tv"-link and see what the TV-less kids have been up to, I'd say it's a good thing. Whenever one trades TV-time for book-time is IMO good. Reading books is more work, but the action goes on inside your head. It's not spoonfed like with TV. You can make up your own interpretation about various things, how the characters look like etc.
Start reading some book today! Read 10 pages today, and 10 next week. Or the whole book at once. Just read, it's fun.
Sweet daydreaming!
Nah, I'll just boot up my laptop and watch a DVD or something. :-) Once that runs out there's always a book or two to read! sri
How do you know what the tuner will cost in 2006? This is *electronics*, folks, remember. We're talking rapidly falling prices, ESPECIALLY when the items hit mass market level. If we have millions of people buying HDTV downconverter boxes, we'll see the price drop to $100 or less.
New York Senate Race.
Hell, the terrorists are already released..
enough that farts could be constitutionally regulated by Congress.
Those would be the Senators.
Agreed!
In Australia, digital television (DTV) broadcasts have not yet begun - they are scheduled to do so from the beginning of 2001 (ie., next year). In the interim, the government has been working out the details with industry, consumer groups and other "interested parties". Some of the decisions made include:
For most people, SDTV is going to be where all the action is, simply because of the cost of HDTV sets (mentioned by others previously). The headache you have to remember is that "it has been written" (on a number of Web sites discussing DTV) that to fully appreciate HDTV you need a fairly large, flat screen - ergo the large HDTV sets and their associated high costs in other parts of the world at present.
Thankfully, given that Australia is using the same digital broadcasting standards as Europe and most of the rest of the world (Japan has a slightly modified DVB-T setup, whereas the U.S. has - typically - gone it alone), we will be able to reap the benefits of an even larger market thus pushing prices down faster than in the U.S.
You will not be forced to buy new televisions (or VCRs, or other equipment), if you don't care about the increased quality. You will, though, have to purchase a converter box for every old NTSC device you want to receive the broadcasts. It may be a bit clumsy and inconvenient, but no more than today's cable boxes. People will probably say "but the price is too high!", but this is now - it will be different when we have millions of people buying them and companies clamoring to meet a low price point. Almost all electronics *start off* expensive.
These answers about the recodring issue are unbelievably stupid---what I'd expect from people who can't program the clock on a VCR.
People (like myself) who have no interest in watching commercials have multiple VCRs ganged together (I have 4). This allows me to tape anything that looks remotely interesting, and also allows me to watch previously recorded material while I am recording new material.
Half-assed "solutions" like leaving the cable box tuned to some channel, or a cable mouse do nothing to solve these problems. The minimal solution involves a tuner in each VCR that can tune into a digital channel and record the resultant signal on tape. Not essential, but very useful, would also be an MPEG decoder in the VCR that can then generate an NTSC out (though in a pinch one could imagine the VCR generating a digital out fed to an external decoder).
Now I'm confused. Do you work for Microsoft, or Hillary Clinton's election campaign in NY?
How can you be so naive?
An obvious use of the system will be so that digital VCRs will not allow you to fast forward over commercials---just like DVD players won't allow you to fast forward over the FBI warning.
Be very careful what you wish for in digital TV. I suspect if this stuff goes forward as currently planned, I'll be saying "screw it" and give up TV in 5 or 10 years when analog broadcasts end.
He's Ray Noorda's right hand man at Caldera.
Ray is a bitter old man.
And the tuner will cost just a little less than a DVD player. $300 is the cost of a TV for a lot of people.
Oh for crying out loud. People wach TV for the CONTENT. Not for the quality of the picture. If I wanted to watch a superb quality picture of boring content, I'd stare out the window. PBS doesn't become any more compelling now that it has 4x the resolution.
Maynard
When I read your post, I thought it looked somehow familiar.. And then I realized, your description of a TV watcher is very similar to the description of an Opium addict in the late 1800's. (I don't mean to imply that Opium is less addictive). If you just substitue some of the appropriate words, you will see what I mean...
Aaah, poor Pac Bell.
Is this the same Pac Bell that just this month slammed me away from my chosen Long Distance carrier? First time I called them to complain, they HUNG UP on me. Then when I called my long distance carrier and set up a conference call with Pac Bell, it was like speaking to a chimpanzee. Personally I say fuck them---let ATT screw them out of whatever money they want to---at least ATT have never treated me as badly as Pac Bell.
Oh for christ's sake. This is what happens when every pinhead gets a pulpit.
The broadcasters have FREE use of spectrum. Why should they get to use something limited and very valuable for free? They get that because they agree to go along with FCC mandates in various ways. HDTV was THEIR IDEA. They were the ones who, when asked to jusify why they got for free spectrum that other users (wireless networks, cell phones etc) pay for, said that they would justify themselves by providing HDTV. All the FCC is doing is making them live up to their side of the bargain.
Yes and minitel is such cool technology isn't it? Why did those stupid Americans bother to come up with TCP/IP and protocols on top of it when good-old government mandated minitel was there?
And do you have digital VCRs yet?
If so, how much are they?
If not, then presumably everything I have said about how one cannot record multiple channels in parallel remains true?
Movies are stored on DVD disk as 24 fps?
In your dreams.
It is frequently the case that the movies are stored as 60 fields/sec. Even for PAL titles the movies are sometimes stored in some perverted 50 fields/sec interlaced format.
You would not believe the stupidity of the same some of these things are encoded unless you've written a DVD decoder.
We still get BBC/ITV etc + a few extra channels for "free".
We can then pay a subscrition for "prime" channels (MTV, QVC, Sky, Sports etc)
Generally if you do not subscribe, then you would have to pay for a digital box. If you subscribe you get the box for free.
We still have to pay for a "TV Licence" but as this gets us 2 analog + 2 extra (maybe more now) digital only channels, 5 national radio stations, and numerous local radio stations with quality programming and NO adverts. I don't think £98 (around $145) is that excessive.
dude ... go read once in a while... Find out what a 3:2 pulldown is and THEN come back and start posting that DVD's do not run at 24 fps....
Oh this is a comment grounded in reality.
Call me when the sitcoms and dramas of NBC, WB etc are being offered on-demand at the same quality as the TV broadcast. Until that day (at least twenty years from now) don't waste my time with such a stupid argument.
Here's a hint-not everyone who watches TV cares about movies. Not everyone who watches TV is interested in copying HBO. Heck, some of us even think that film is a grossly overrated medium driven by mentally defective psychos, and that TV serials are where the interesting content happens.
Typical clueless media type - it's PAUL Allen. Steve Allen is the old Tonight Show host.
What are the ethernet, USB, and data ports for? Is that box a combination of a convertor and cable modem?
I wonder just how many people realize that their TV's of today are going to be obsolete tomorrow. Sure, there are going to be 'set top convertors' - nothing like having to buy a $250 convertor to make your $400 TV work with the 'new and improved' standard all so you can watch tv programming that isn't worth $.02. It would be quite interesting to see what exactly would happen if there was a consumer revolt and NOBODY bought into this DTV scheme. Imagine how quick it would get thrown out if EVERYONE complained that they couldn't watch their TV shows anymore.
Of course, I am not sure we need to watch shows like "Springer" in wide-screen digital stereo. I could be wrong though.
"But in one area digital technology has yet to fully take hold: And that's television."
That comment about sums it up.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
AFAIK, you can get decent quality in 2Mbps, and IIRC you can send 6Mbps through a classic TV "channel", so cable companies that switched to digital would actually find themselves awash in extra bandwidth (which they would probably use for cable modems). I'm not an expert, so I could be wrong.
Television is the most precious and most characteristic aspect of American culture. TV has made us everything that we are as a nation. For the government to interfere in this medium is beyond endurance. I do not exaggerate when I refer to TV as "sacred"; TV brings the benefits of advertising (the free market) and standardized culture (intellectual democracy) to every household in our land, except for a few whining liberals who don't own sets. Quite frankly, I don't think that anybody lacking a television can or should be considered a patriot, or even a citizen. Who do they think they are? What, are they better than us, these tobacco-puffing overeducated snots with their "Kill Your Television" bumper stickers on their miserable foreign cars? These disgusting liberals are the kind of people who live in places like Cambridge, MA or the Old City in Philadelphia, smirking creeps with cats and with shelf after shelf full of books. They serve no purpose in this great nation of ours. They should, honestly, be deported. They listen to bands like Stereolab (psychopathic French deviant socialists who allow a woman to write songs, with predictable results). They buy their smirking little garlic presses at Williams-Sonoma. They are vile. God has condemned them to rot eternally in Hell, and if I were Him, I'd do the same in a minute.
You can set the box to a channel and leave it turned on (sending the signal through the VCR) to record. You can't set it to record from two different channels though. I'm sure they will build it into a VCR (and TV) eventually, there will be no point having analog inputs on a VCR when all stations are digital.
DIVX died... or so we thought. Look at the squabble over this "information control". It looks like DIVX all over again. What's next? Someone has to plug their smart card into the set to watch TV? This is fucking scary.
The trick is (I'm sure the FCC guy missed spelling this out) that you can't legally restrain people from time shifting their TV programmes (fair use), but the law doesn't require you to make this possible (it wasn't before VCRs were invented) or cheap (it wasn't when VCRs were a luxury)...
Digital copies amplify the time-shifting effect because they let you "lend" a programme to a friend without reduced quality. Worse though, you can make copies, again without reduced quality. This further reduces the value of repeated showings, and US TV is increasingly dominated by repeat showings.
So TV media companies would like to make it impossible for you to effectively use a VCR, or an equivalently unsophisticated piece of technology with their new higher quality programmes. Ideally they'd zap time shifting altogether, but customer's probably won't stand for that, so they'll stick with making the new VCR equivalents expensive and copy-controlled.
Six months down the road, when companies decide that you'd like to watch HDTV on your friendly 19in flatscreen monitor, all this work will be wasted; digital decoders will be built into TV cards and the important new bits will be implemented in software (it's cheaper) so you'll be able to "back up" The Simpsons to HDD and watch it again later.
Everybody should read the link above. They are divvying up the cash as we speak...
1) my cable bill does not go up (it's already $40 a month) 2) The decoder box will be provided free of charge (I want to keep my 15 yr old TV with ciggarett burns on top, plus I am very cheap) 3) I don't lose any channels I have now, or at least not discovery, the learning channel, A&E, history, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, E! (no stern on radio here, only on E!) 4) So long as those conditions are met gimme digital cable
thanks nostradomus. can i borrow your crystal ball when you're done with it?
the crackpots running around this joint should be rounded up and put on a train to Auschwitz.
Not one TV set was obsoleted by the introduction of color and no extra bandwitch or simulcasting was needed to do color. One of the DTV proposals had this feature (RCA's I believe), but got jeered down by the everything-should-be-PPV-and-uncopyable greed squad.
On digital cable systems, the basic level of service is still digital. What is sold as the "Digital Premium" package is just more channels on the same digital system.
Usually prices go up when a system converts to digital, however.
Digital cable systems run on slightly different standards -- so it's harder to make a VCR tuner that's compatible them all.
In addition, there probably is some authentication system built into the digital cable box to prevent piracy.
I won't watch TV! It debilitates the mind. Most of the content on television I find to be an insult to my intelligence.
The internet is better in that I can pick and choose the content I want to flood my intellect and I can elect not to be abused by the dreadful advertising. Animated gifs make me dizzy.
Digital satellite receivers have event timers; some even have infared emitters that can simulate pressing "record" or "stop" on a remote control for your VCR so you don't have to set two timers in lockstep. There's no reason a cable receiver couldn't do this, except that the lack of standards mean nobody wants to buy good cable equipment only to throw it away when they move.
earth to clueless: broadcasters do not have limitless spectrum. if they choose to waste their spectrum with a shortsighted plan that you suggest, they will miss the boat when everyone moves to HDTV broadcasting.
Please stop regurgitating bullcrap that you have read elsewhere. If you don't have a clue, it's ok to admit it and ask the folks who do.
You think that's a coincidence? The Cable Internet and DSL people are intentionally avoiding each other's markets to ensure that they both have a monopoly for a period of time.
(Makes some sense when you consider the costs of build-out. They can't afford a price war now.)
Unlike Dolby receivers or DVD players, there are real reasons that HD recievers are expensive -- it's not simple to make a (relatively) large, high resolution picture tube or flat screen monitor.
As for interstate commerce and a really strong broadcast station, they've had several test runs in North Carolina where, running the transmitter at 5-10% power resulted in a clear image well over 100 miles away. It's very reasonable that, with HDTV, a handful of regional broadcast towers could provide broadcast television to the whole country.
Who should be the most frightened by this? The local network affiliates. Why? Because, the advent of cable and their being able to extend beyong their broadcast range (no antenna will pick up a broadcast TV station except for PBS where I live, but NBC, CBS, UPN, etc. show up via cable... those 'local' stations would soon disappear if the whole Midwest could be served from a central tower).
You also have to take into account that the laws come from the East Coast, where states are small enough that farts could be constitutionally regulated by Congress.
-Derek
"Even if a lot of people could afford the TVs and service, how many people does the FCC think would buy it?"
"Digital broadcasting needs entirely new equipment and that equipment costs money. What was the FCC thinking?"
That`s the point.. Somebody want`s to make a lot of money throbbing this down on us.
Seems nobody but the electronics industry want`s DTV to be prematurely pushed onto the
market. What they are trying to do is make analog tv obsolete, forcing us consumers to
invest in expensive equipment. Even if the technology isn`t mature for the market.
Consumers don`t want DTV (yet, anyway), it`s the electronics industry who has lobbyed
this into effect.
Welcome outside, Wako the Sane ;-)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Twain.
Lloyd Alexander's Taran series. (Goes well w/Narnia)
Lynne Reid's Indian in the Cupboard series (more fantasy, but pretty good guy novels - Cowboys and Indians, awww-yeah!)
Possibly the Oz books (a whole bunch of them).
I believe Ben Bova's Exiled from Earth is the kids book about people getting tossed off a degenerate Earth, but it's been awhile, so I might be mis-associating a title with a different book.
Bertrand R. Brinley's Mad Scientist's Club - Damn fine backyard hardware hackers. :)
John Christopher's White Mountains, basically Battlefield Earth for kids.
Beverly Cleary Runaway Ralph - not quite sci-fi...
The Name of the Sun by B.W. Clough - might be too advanced (some kids *really* get into reading, others don't...) & it's fantasy.
Dinosaur Planet & Survivors, by Anne McCaffrey (again, dunno how advanced that is...)
The Secret of NIHM by Robert C. O'Brien.
Santiago by Mike Resnick - again, maybe on the advanced side, but easy adult reads.
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Verne :)
I've long complained that there aren't enough sci-fi novels for kids, were it not for Heinlein, I don't think I ever would have picked it up, but damn that man could write...
I just wish other writers had the talent and the dedication to have put out a book a year for juveniles...
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Damn /. doesn't take tags - I wish it told you, we'll accept this subset of tags (no pre, no cite, etc) :P
Somedays it pays to use submit, but if it doesn't like - I'm going to plain text and underscores.
on the one hand they try to destroy the internet, you cant say 'cock' on the air, but oh boy oh boy, we got digital "judge judy" 24/7 on 900 channels! fuck the fcc
Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight' O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming. And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave? On the shore dimly seen, thro' the mists of the deep, Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam, In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream; 'Tis the star-spangled banner: oh, long may it wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion A home and a country should leave us no more? Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. Oh, thus be it ever when free men shall stand, Between their loved homes and the war's desolation; Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land Praise the Power that has made and preserved us as a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, And this be our motto: "In God is our trust"; And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
HDTV decoder boxes, I believe, have analog NTSC outputs, both composite and S-video. This way, they can be hooked up to VCR's and such. Someone who can't afford the TV can just buy an HDTV decoder box now, and connect it to their conventional TV. When they can afford an HDTV, they'll already have the decoder, and will only have to swap out the set. Really simple. -^o.o^
*sigh* -- it is a real shame to see the number of /. readers that do NOT know the difference between digital tv and the CURRENT digital cable and digital sat. ... currently digital cable and sat. (with the exception of ONE HBO and ONE PPV on DirecTV) are 240 lines of resolution ... ATSC DTV will START at 480 lines of res. and go up to (I believe) 1440 ... I currently own a video grade front projector that can do 1600X1200@72Hz and cost me all of $1900.00US ... I project that onto a screen that is ~9' wide even with all the upconversion and de-interlacing that my HT-PC can do to an NTSC signal it STILL looks like CRAP! ... Now DVD on the other hand for the MOST part (there are a FEW that are in 'WIDESCREEN' format that are only 240 lines) have 480 lines of res. now you take you average dvd player and hook it to your average 27" TV and your like "whoa ... I don't get what the big deal is" ... now take a PROGRESSIVE dvd player (or a fvf player in an HTPC) and hook it to a good projector or hell a 36" monitor and THEN you will see the difference...
The problem right now is that there are only a select few DVD players that are capable of outputting a digital signal that is in 720 progressive scanlines.. Until these players become more common, I am going to wait to get an HDTV.
>you still have a black ad white tv ? :)
>damn dude, take a jump ahead to the 1970's
>seriously, why would you want a black and white tv ? the only person i
>know who has one is my grandmother and she keeps it in the closet and
>never uses it (she now has a colour).
>unless your colour blind or an extreme fundamentalist, i dont see the
Try shooting your mouth off next time there's a storm in your area and it knocks out the power. I'll be watching the news and other things on my 5 inch battery-powerd b&w tv I bought from K-mart for $19.95. You'll be staring at the blank screen of your HDTV....
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
How many consumer A/V stanards do you know of that started out as ready for the average consumer? They're ALL upper class toys for the first couple of years.
Charter is the nations fourth largest cable company, and here is their spin on telling your government representatives why you want the cable company to dictate to you who your ISP will be. http://forcedaccess.chartercom.com/ "Charter's ability to offer leading edge technology to consumers will be thoroughly compromised if forced to reconfigure broadband networks so that competing businesses can use them to sell Internet access." Change "Charter" and "broadband" to "Your local phone company" and "telephone" and you see where this turd of an idea comes from. Tell your local ISP to make their voice heard, too. Paul Allen has a lot more money to spend on this than any of us have, but he only gets one vote, and he can't vote in all the cities that cut cable contracts. Let your city officials know how your choice of ISP is an issue you take to the voting booth.
I hate external decoders of any kind. Why can't they build this shit into a VCR. There's lots of stuff I want to watch when (1) I'm at work, (2) I'm asleep, or (3) won't have time to watch until the weekend. Why the fuck is gov't and industry getting between me and tv/movies? Am I just thinking like an asshole or something here?
It's legal to record from TV. That's what VCRs were intended for.
As such it has no ability to lock out recording. Before VCRs, control of viewing was in the hands of the broadcasters. Once aired, it could be known for certain that people wouldn't be watching the same stuff later or save copies. Now Hollywood wants to make sure that the next standard has switchable copy protection built into the standard. They're going to try to get the broadcast equivalent of region lockouts, macrovision, SCMS, and DIVX (for PPV stuff) rammed into the new standard.They hate analog because they can't control copying (macrovision is a weak protection scheme and is easily snipped with a $10 box).
Supposedly, the 6MHZ wide NTSC channels are used highly innefficiently. Why couldn't they piggy back the digital signal onto NTSC such that the signal as a whole remains backwards compatible? New sets could receive the enhanced resolution data and old sets would ignore it. When color TV came about, did they decide to obsolete all B&W sets? Hell no! There would've been consumer riots. So they wedged the color data into a "colorburst" (high speed high-density data pulse with color info in the blanking interval). B&W sets ignored the pulse. Colot TV sets picked it up and used it to add color to the next scanline. DTV should have done something similar. Obsoleting NTSC is pure idiocy.
The FCC should just pick a standard, with no copy protection, easiest to implement, and then just make compliance a condition of broadcasters license renewals (yes, nowadays even cable-only broadcasters have to be FCC licensed, so they get included). Anyone who doesn't like it can get off the air and go lock themselves in a sealed chamber with their "precious" proprietary programming. Seems pretty simple to me.
> It sounds to me that the Commission's mandate is
:) If there's enough demand for digital TV, it will happen. Trying to set an artificial timeline for it will just force them to try implementing things before they're ready, or the government will step in and screw it all up.
> exactly to 'protect the citizens' rights' when
> the market tries to abuse them.
That's what I'm saying, though. Since when is viewing digital TV a right? That's like saying everyone has a right to a Rolls-Royce. It's one thing if the FCC is going to allocate the bandwidth for digital TV, but it's quite another to say "We are mandating a new road system. You'd better have it built in 5 years. It's the law."
The market hasn't abused anything, because the market hasn't really done anything at all...
In the meantime, things like DVD have given the early adopters enough of a new toy with a better picture that they've taken the steam out of an immediate "need" for higher-quality TV.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
> First of all, current low-definition TV takes a
> lot less bandwidth than HDTV, and most cablecos
> and TV networks would rather have more channels
> than a few really high quality ones.
No kidding. We've actually got a couple channels here that are 2-in-1, to make room for the "digital" cable service ( = "look at the mpeg artifacts, honey!"). VH1 from 3am to 3pm, then it turns to Comedy Central... gee, thanks TCI.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Color TVs can recieve B/W signals and B/W TVs understand color signals.
Not true for digital/analog...
I don't think the FCC is requiring digital HDTVs, etc yet. I think the current solution is box+analog TV. (Which is what current digital cable solutions and all digital satellite solutions are.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
there was actual a full private-eye mystery novel that was published as a palindrome (although, just letters, not capitalization or spacing). I forget how many pages long it was, I know it was either over 100 or over 200. Not the most incredible reading from what I understand, though :)
I admit now that all I read was the first link, another summary.
However, what I read said that he would ask his staff to come up with a proposed set of rules to govern this stuff. Nothing like actually writing up a real standard.
If I'm wrong, then please reply with a little more detail there next time, Mr. Ben Stein.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If the gov't thinks this process should be moving quicker, why don't they propose a standard, or build a cheaper TV set? I have no respect for those who whine about arbitrary deadlines, without considering the issues.
And what's this about illegally copying cable programs? I thought people have been legally copying them for years. Otherwise, programmable, cable-ready VCRs would be in a legal grey area, right? This sounds about as stupid as the whole "DVD encryption" fiasco.
Oh well, when I get my next computer (hopefully in less than a year) I'll be happy with my built-in DVD-ROM, and hopefully I'll be watching DVD movies on my 17" monitor in a sufficiently righteous resolution. Who needs Digitally Remastered Saved-By-The-Bell-esque crap when you have that?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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Rochester, NY? That's where I am. I got digital cable and it's pretty nice(except early on it kept screwing up and you'd see the picture digitizing).
:)
What's sweet is ordering the pay per view movies and taping them. If only I had a DVD writer
Well anyway, the prices couldn't go up much higher than as is. It's currently ~$100/month for cable TV and the cable modem. Damn you Time Warner.
mine pieces together the picture, it's annoying as hell, sometime it will take up to 3 or 4 seconds
I have some other small gripes about the Scientific Atlantic box and the software, but in general I'm pleased, especially with the picture and sound quality
My guesses:
1. Digital broadcasters will all opt for multiple low-res channels as opposed to one high-res channel.
2. Digital cable companies will compress channels into the high-lossy realm. We'll have more infomercials than ever; there won't be the content to fill all those channels for quite some time
3. Digital to analog converters will be a huge business. Most people will keep their analog televisions during the next decade.
4. Digital television will succeed greasest as an add-on card to personal computers using flat screen monitors. These computers will be hooked up to cable, not an antenna.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
For now, DTV and HDTV (just a higher picture quality of DTV, term to be phased out) are more expensive. Forcing the demise of analog may be quick, but it'll happen in time.
The prices will go down for the added DTV capabilities, much like how (B&W TV | Color TV | LD | CD | DVD) units used to cost thousands, now you practically get them with your corn flakes, and digital to analog converters will be available cheaply once it gets to mass production.
Do you get ghosts? static? DTV pretty much eliminates them. A magazine I subscribed (Popular Science?) did a test and at every site they tried, DTV reception was fairly flawless while the analog counterpart has static and ghosts.
Other posts indicate that the extra equipment doesn't cost more to operate.
We live out in the sticks and aren't likely to see cable anytime soon- and with local planning laws we can't have a satellite dish (can't have the tourists thinking us quaint old rural folk have technology now, can we?). Thus I was originally worried that OnDigital would be pants because I had no other choice for multichannel TV.
The answer is far from it. OnDigital ROCKS. Super sharp picture, digital now/next programme guide, loads of GOOD channels including loads of British and American programming.
It costs twelve quid (US$18) a month for 30 regular channels, and premium stuff such as new movies and football start at an extra seven quid (US$11) a month.
Nice thing about the receiver set top box is that it is BIOS flash upgradable over the airwaves. You just tell it to download the latest upgrade and off it goes. There are new features added every couple of months. Picture-in-picture teletext was the last upgrade; email is coming soon.
I just can't imagine life anymore without Cartoon Network.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
No, IIRC NTSC is the second FCC color standard, and do remember that there were a number of early television experiments since the 20's. A lot of people were working on it.
The original color standard was basically going to transmit the R, G and B channels as sequential black and white signals, and the reciver would have a synchronized spinning wheel in front of the tube with R, G and B filters. But it was incompatable with the black and white transmission system and a real pain in the ass. NTSC was clearly a better choice when it was picked.
Personally, I think that local NTSC broadcasts should be left alone, BUT send HDTV signals over subsidized low-cost cable in cities, or digital satellite for rural areas. (somewhat like universal phone service) With a bit of work I think it shouldn't be hard to pipe local channels to their appropriate geographic areas. This wouldn't apply for pay channels, just the stuff you'd normally expect to get on VHF/UHF broadcasts.
Then slowly phase out NTSC broadcasts as the market switches to HDTV. Say 20-30 years.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
"Many areas still have legalized monoplies (the exact opposite of what should be happening in a market controlled partially by the government)."
You couldn't be more wrong. When the government controls a "market" (in quotes cuz it really stops being a market then, doesn't it?), legalized monopolies are what happens. In fact, that's the ONLY way a legalized monopoly can exist, just look at the words: LEGALized monopoly. When the local gov't grants an exclusive charter for a power company, cable company, phone company, taxi company, or whatever, that's a legalized monopoly. Only de-regulation can solve this problem.
MoNsTeR
here I go advancing my personal politcal agenda again...
Hey FCC, WHY IN THE FLYING FUCK IS THIS NECESSARY, HMMMM???!!!
I was at Best Buy the other day scoping out a new stereo, and I decide to wander through the TV section to check out this whole HDTV thing. Well, they've got this display of two equally-sized (56", yikes!) Panasonic TVs, one digial, one analog. Aside from a difference in their color settings (totally unrelated to technology differences), I simply could not tell the difference. And what's more, I didn't see any HDTV sets in reasonable sizes. If I wanna go digital, why can't I do it for less than four figures? I don't even have room in my house for a 50-some inch TV (much less the cash to afford one).
But... I do recognize that some people really do dig this digital TV thing, for whatever reason. I think they're crazy for it, but lots of people think *I'm* crazy for liking Trinitron screens. Go figure.
The point is that the government has ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS forcing me to buy a $3000 TV I don't want just to have the same functionality I have now, whether it's now or in 6 years. And if they succeed in making the relevant industries switch over by then, that's exactly what will be happening since I won't be able to watch digital signals on my old analog sets.
Why is analog TV soooooo horrible that we've got to rid ourselves of it so quickly? As another poster noted, I'd rather have cable internet service than digital TV. Hell, I rarely watch TV at all. If the industry wants to take its sweet time figuring out a standard, then let's let it! I don't see how the FCC barging in and setting the standard (and making it law, to boot) would be beneficial to ANYONE.
As a free-market'er and a Libertarian, this pisses me off. It's time we start working to get the government out of our businesses and lives.
www.lp.org
www.self-gov.org
www.mises.org
MoNsTeR
If something better came along that does not break compatibility with our existing equipment, I don't think you would be hearing these (justified, IMNSHO) complaints.
But at what point to you simply ignore the complaints and drive ahead?
I mean, I'm sure there were complaints from the buggy-whip camp when autos became available, or from typewriter users when the first wordprocessors were available. Imagine society if we had not ignored them.
(then again.. sounds like a tech-free vacation to me, but I definitely wouldn't want to live there..)
Your Working Boy,
(Intermedia, now Charter)
Lol.. "Helicon Communications" here in Vermont just changed names to Charter... Its a global conspiracy..
SB.
> The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.
You forgot to mention that at 8 years old you'll understand less than half of the jokes. But most of them will still be fun.
Reread the books when you're 20 or so, and you'll have double the fun!
Nobody, repeat NOBODY "gets" more than 80 or 90% of the jokes in a Terry Pratchett book. You really need a whole army of people to find them all. I once read a TP book, just after reading a Dawkins book. Only then do you understand that TP had just been reading that same Dawkins book just before writing his book. This goes COMPLETELY past you if you haven't read the other book less than a few months before....
Roger.
I may give up television if NTSC goes away without a cost-effective alternative.
I must say I was initially skeptical about digital TV but when I was home over christmas I used it every day...
One thing I found rather absurd is that there was no direct equivalent of the teletext information services in digital form. We had fancy online shopping and whatnot but none of the magazine style content that traditional teletext gives.
The picture is sharper, and a widescreen TV is definately a good thing. But if you've spent any amount of time playing around with video codecs then you'll see the kind of artifacts that mpeg produces. - YOu have to know what to look for though.
The US needs someone like the BBC to kick them into shape - the BBC have always take a lead in supporting standards - RDS is a good example. No radio station was going to get RDS until radios included RDS and the manufacturers weren't going to include RDS until stations started using it.
The BBC set it up and now it's spreading....
DragonHawk said -
[bobbit] Given the limited initial demand for HDTV, what do you think the broadcasters are going to do? Waste all that bandwidth on a signal most are not going to use, or give us what we currently have and lots of extra money leasing their bandwidth? I know which one I would bet on.
So, if you think you are going to be seeing a better TV picture any time soon, think again. Except to spend lots of money to upgrade your equipment, but with zero reward. [/bobbit]
If you live in a major TV market you can see hi-def TV _right_now_. Last night's X-files was available as hi-def TV to those who had digital TVs in the big markets. More and more programs will be available in HD, just the way color TV slowly took over from black & white.
True, the option of whether to broadcast HD signals or a lesser-grade picture is up to the broadcaster and some stations, especially smaller ones, will opt for the cheaper route of using their NTSC legacy programming to save money; conversion to HD is going to be expensive. At the bare minimum a station has to have a new encoder and transmitter. Most will require much more. (The going rate for the encoder alone is $250,000)
You will have to throw away your analog TV. The station has to throw away their analog cameras, recorders, switchgear and distribution, transmitters and test equipment. The smaller ones will stick with NTSC-quality and lease out the three (not five) remaining NTSC-quality virtual channels to pay the bills.
When the digital TV conversion is complete, you will see either the wide-screen HDTV picture or you will have four channels to choose from instead of one. Either way you DO get more. (Yes, you might have four channels that suck instead of one)
It's inconceivable that broadcasters would simply stick with a single NTSC-quality signal and lease out the remaining bandwidth for wireless data. Who would buy it? It is still a one-way path from the transmitter to you.
Do broadcasters hope the whole idea of HDTV will flop and go away? Not after investing millions of dollars in new equipment. Real world experience proves broadcasters want it to happen; there are far more stations converting to digital than industry forecasts expected and the FCC Orders required.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
Said I:
/SARCASM
It's inconceivable that broadcasters would simply stick with a single NTSC-quality signal and lease out the remaining bandwidth for wireless data. Who would buy it? It is still a one-way path from the transmitter to you.
Said DH:
Um, gee, the wireless communications market is only hotter then the core of the sun right now. I can't imagine what anyone would want all that bandwidth for.
Is the wireless market hot for ONE-WAY bandwidth? I can see the possibility for fast downloads for browsing if broadcasters wanted to get into the ISP business and use bandwidth above a single NTCS-quality channel to blast out HTML content.
But, put it in a real situation; take an average-sized TV market, 400,000 people. Maybe they have 6 local TV stations. If any ONE of those stations devotes the other 3/4 of their bandwidth to wireless data, that's enough bandwidth to serve the whole community. The other five stations can't get into the same wireless ISP business and expect to pay the transmitter power bill with that income.
The recurring theme that TV must convert to digital to "pull off the swindle" is ludicrous. The TV industry is making the largest investment in its history to convert. If HDTV should fail, they are screwed. This is not a 'trial balloon' for TV. It's sink or swim, and trying to use the bulk of the band for one-way datacasting won't make it float.
My bookcase is full of TV industry trade pubs and direct mail ads. They are all for HDTV conversion equipment. Not a one of them advertises any kind of wireless datacast service or equipment.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
Let the cable subscriber's set top box or HDTV receiver decode the signal.
There is enough useless crap on my local cable system that there shouldn't be a problem with adding the HDTV signals from the local TV stations.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I suppose the market they are worried the most about is small video stores that would make digital recordings of PPV or HBO movies and then sell or rent the copies.
Other than that, you would have to be paranoid to care. Last week's football game or a Simpsons episode has so little commercial value that it wouldn't be worth the effort.
I suspect that their solution is to quash recordable digital media. Compatible DVD-WO doesn't exist yet, and DigitalVHS has been in limbo forever, and DV camcorders are limited to a short record time. I suspect these facts aren't coincidental.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The airwaves are owned by the public, so the theory is that the government is ensuring that they are put to wise use. Five different AM Stereo formats wasn't in anyone's best interest except the people trying to kill AM stereo.
Computer standards on the other hand are controlled by Intel and Microsoft, there is no implied public interest.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
OK, the alternative scenario is that everyone buys a new TV in the next 5 years, and we spend the rest of our days watching "Urkel" in full photorealistic resolution. The broadcasters happily give the analog spectrum back to the government. Then Heidi Klum falls in love with me and I win the lotto. It's going to be a glorious future!
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The limits to their spectrum expanded significantly when Congress granted them both the digital and the analog spectrum for free.
With current television hardware, HDTV will be a failure. Most people don't even have TVs good enough for DVD resolution, and many (such as myself) even get crappy NTSC pictures. The market for system which potentially has 2x DVD resolution has to be very limited.
And the broadcasters know this -- they'll broadcast enough HDTV until they can declare it a failure. Then they'll start using their digital spectrum for multiple networks over the air (or for paging services, etc.).
Meanwhile, wait for the whole digital transition to be declared a partial failure. That means the broadcasters can hold onto both the analog and the digitial spectrums, for free, until Congress can be convinced to ignore the money being waved in their face and turn off every little old lady's analog TV. It probably won't happen before 2015.
The broadcasters aren't stupid here -- they know that "everyone" isn't going to move to HDTV for a long time, and plan to take maximum advantage of the situation. They're in the process of pulling of one of the greatest scams in US history.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I love the Grinch. No childhood without the Grinch is complete, dammit.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
I think I first read C. S. Lewis' Narnia novels around that age. They're very cool. There's a subtle Christian subtext in them, but when I was a kid it was way too subtle for me to notice.
Robert A. Heinlein's "juvenile" novels: The Star Beast (which lured me into SF at around age 8), Time for the Stars, Between Planets, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Farmer in the Sky, Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, Tunnel in the Sky, and several others that don't come to mind immediately. I assume you've read Heinlein's adult SF, but if you haven't, you should know that (IIRC) anything he wrote for adults after the early 1960's tends to have sex in it. His juveniles, though, were written in the 1950's with the intent of reaching a wide audience of young people and getting them interested in space exploration, and they stay within the bounds of what was considered "suitable for children" at that time.
Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels are very good also: In order, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. There's a fourth one, Tehanu, which was intended for adults and which may or may not be suitable for a child. It's pretty grim in spots. It's also slow-moving enough that a child may just be bored by it.
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels. Del Rey published a set of these back in the 1980's which had some of the best cover art I've ever seen, but um, the art itself was a bit racy in spots. The books themselves, however, are entirely "suitable for children" by the standards that were current around 1919.
Hmmm . . . of the above, Lewis and LeGuin and to some extent Burroughs fall more in the "fantasy" category than "SF", but at that age I didn't make much of a distinction. At any rate, all of the above are books that I still read from time to time in my thirties.
All the "suitable for children" crap above is merely because I don't know where you stand on such things, and for some people that's a concern. My parents let me read anything I wanted to, and it didn't seem to do me any harm.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Not just likely. They're commited to doing it.
Multicast NTSC durring the daytime (for children's shows) and HDTV at night.
Wow can you cook on that sucker like I can on my old coax box?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
In France we have had DTV for a long time now, first by satellite, then on cable. I think that in all Europe now satellite TV is synonymous with digital and that only a few consider buying a dish for the purpose of getting analog broadcasts.
Well Americans should not worry. Their "do not involve the government" approach can also lead to standarts. Like Windows.
Minitel is what technology could give in 1978 for mass access to an early form of e-business.
Besides, there would be no internet if not for the HTTP protocol, which has been invented by a government paid American, working for a European institution. You would be reliant on proprietary protocols from AOL, MSN or I dont know what if he hadn't been there.
and BTW, not just HTTP, but all the TCP/IP protocols stem from government endorsed research and academia.
Note that there is no American CE industry anymore. All the CE, and particularly TV, industry is Japanese, Corean and European. So apart from M$ trying to put its stuff everywhere and Time Warner / AOL negociating their content (Sony already owns a substantial part of the catalog), what does the US has to offer to consortiums that define standarts ?
If there's enough demand for digital TV, it will happen.
hat's just an irrational faith in the market system. There's a chicken and egg problem here. What broadcaster is going to give away his market in order to champion a switch to a digital system.
All I want is compatible standards so that I can watch a movie in wide screen at home.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I highly recommend it. I rarely watch any television, occasionally I watch one owned by a friend, so I am exposed to TV every once in a while.
I have to agree. Watching people watch TV is kind of horrifying. It's weird so see a perfectly good brain just sitting there rotting itself. Even if a person only watches a couple of shows every week, this translates into a pretty significant percentage of a person's non-work hours being spent in an activity that benefits only the advertizers.
I cannot believe that people *volunteer* to be abused by corporations in this way. People PAY for televisions, and PAY for cable/satellite service, which they really don't need, and why? So they can watch largely useless and silly programming, the only purpose of which is to trick you into watching hours and hours of subtle, mindbending persuasion, the purpose of which, in turn, is to condition viewers/subjects/victims to buy still MORE shit they don't need and didn't even know that wanted until they saw whichever bimbo-with-a-toothy-and-seductive-grin is popular this month on that INFERNAL FUCKING BOX OF DISTRACTION!!
Oooh.. that feels better...
Check this out:
http://www.adbusters.org
No, IIRC NTSC is the second FCC color standard, and do remember that there were a number of early television experiments since the 20's.
The original color standard was basically going to transmit the R, G and B channels as sequential black and white signals, and the reciver would have a synchronized spinning wheel in front of the tube with R, G and B filters.
The spinning color wheel was (iirc) CBS's system. It was just a screwy idea, akin to Baird's mechanical television systems. It was never an actual standard, though. It was only used by CBS in some experimental broadcasts.
What became NTSC was RCA's totally electronic color system. As you said it had the huge advantage of being compatible with B&W recievers (which used the original RCA B&W system), plus it didn't need a big wheel spinning away all the time. I don't think the CBS system was ever seriously considdered as a viable color standard.
Also, unlike color/bw, the new digital tv sets are not automatically compatible with the old standard. You have to buy an expensive additional device for that.
Uh, I think you've got that backwards. All the hdtv's I've seen can handle NTSC just fine. The problem (if one can call it that) is that older ntsc sets can't handle hdtv signals.
Personally, I feel that using NTSC in what is supposed to be the most technologically advanced country in the world is simply pathetic. It was the first color television standard for gods sake. It's time to move on. If the FCC had gotten it's act together in the mid-late 80s we would be done with the conversion by now, but they didn't so we get to go through it now (now that there are three or four TVs per home...hmm...).
AFAIK, you can get decent quality in 2Mbps, and IIRC you can send 6Mbps through a classic TV "channel",
Uh, no. You can get crappy quality though 2 Mbps. This is about what TCI's horrible "digital cable" system uses. It is truly a step backwards. Really amazing that people will put up with it.
A 6MHz channel will give you about 19MBps using the HDTV modulation (of which I forget the name) technique. This is why broadcasters like digital, they can use that bandwidth in whatever way they see fit. So they can stick a crappy 2-3 MBps video stream in there and sell the rest as a highspeed data service.
Cable companies don't care for this, though. They have never really given out full 6MHz channels in the first place. They don't gain any extra bandwidth by going to HDTV, they loose it, especially if they can go to a TCI-like digital cable system instead.
Half of their problem is already solved: people are just now upgrading to a medium (DVD) which doesn't have the capacity to handle high definition video...
DTV is good for everybody, the consumer and the broadcasters, as it lets the customer choose the channels they want to get. No more Food network if you don't want it.
"DTV" is good for only one thing: making cable companies more money. They get to free up part of their bandwidth (which they can sell for more money to someone else) and provide crappy over-compressed video to their customers. Plus it makes it seriously harder for them to upgrade to HDTV service in the future, since the previously available bandwidth is now used up by data services.
So they wedged the color data into a "colorburst" (high speed high-density data pulse with color info in the blanking interval).
Umm, not quite. The color burst is just a marker indicating that the signal is in color. The real color information is contained in a high frequency subcarrier hanging on the original B&W luminance signal. It takes up space that was originally the high frequency part of the B&W signal, so you trade a little B&W resolution for color information. The color is also transmitted using some modulation technique (which I cannot remember the name for) which uses phase changes to record information... It's a form of analog compression, really. Phase shifts caused by multipath are why NTSC color sucks to badly... PAL systems solve this last problem by trading a bit of color resolution for a form of analog error correction. NTSC systems solve it with a HUE control....................
It's not the fault of the decoder, though. It's your cable company trying to get away with using as little bandwidth as possible.
yeah I've got TCI digital cable and I've got to say for the most part it sucks.
Often digital channels are pixilated, you don't get that many more channels, most of the extras
are PPV, the tuner is slow as hell, and in unreliably decodes scrambled services like HBO.
Not to mention you can't record without going
through the digital tuner (watch while recording).
The box TCI uses is lame, no automation at all
which breaks recording even more.
I for one am glad the fcc is gonna bust some ballz.
The Dithering artifacts you see while watching one channel could be interference on the line. As far as I know, the boxes are receiving MPEG2 streams to decode -- therefore, for example, when in a lightning storm (probably shouldn't have been watching tv) when the lightning would hit, we would see artifacts -- missed info.
Also, channel changing will be a chore -- the box has to either wait for a "key frame", or "piece" together an entire picture -- which is what you're seeing.
Chow!
Karnal
kill your TV
Speak truth to power.
Here's an excerpt from Wired 5.02, "The Great HDTV swindle":
The long wait for HDTV did create one positive benefit: technology matured, enabling television to go digital. An HDTV picture contains far more visual data than an old-style NTSC picture, because the screen is wider and the image is more detailed. At first no one could see a way of transmitting all this data through a traditional TV channel, which has a bandwidth of just 6 MHz. It was like trying to force four times as much water through an old, small pipe.
But if a picture can be digitized, it can be compressed. For instance, instead of transmitting all the pixels of a plain blue sky, you can send a code saying, "Paint the next 5,000 pixels blue." And if the sky doesn't change during a series of video frames, you can send a code saying, "Keep the sky the same as before." You can also use clever algorithms to average out color variations in ways that are almost imperceptible to the human eye. At the receiving end, a suitable new, improved, digital TV set can be smart enough to understand these coded instructions, decompress the signal, and turn it back into the original picture.
Meanwhile, digitized TV had some mind-boggling implications. If the huge amount of data in an HDTV transmission can be squeezed into one old-fashioned 6-MHz channel, consider what can be done to a low-quality NTSC picture if it, too, is digitized and compressed. It can be reduced to as little as 1 MHz, leaving 5 MHz of a traditional channel "spare."
There's an old joke about NTSC-- they say it means "Never the same colour". It was a compromise. Look at a video capture or two, and you'll see what I mean. Blech.
But by definition, analog NTSC and DTV can't co-exist on the same signal. One picture would interfere with the other. Tricks like WebTop that stick digital data into an unused region (the Vertical Blanking Interval) don't supply nearly enough bandwidth.
HDTV and NTSC can't co-exist because you can't fit HDTV into an analog NTSC signal at all. There's just too much information. You either have to make the bandwith much bigger, or put up with very, very crappy images.
HDTV has to be digital so it can be compressed. The only way NTSC and HDTV can coexist is if you broadcast them separately.
Of course, it's an open question whether HDTV is actually a good idea. Consumers don't like superior tech when it's too expensive.
Um... your analogy was clever, but, I think it is wrong.
A B&W TV can still watch color TV signals, but an NTSC TV cannot watch digital TV signals without additional hardware. Basically, no one was forced to upgrade their B&W TVs to color, but eliminating NTSC would force many people to upgrade their hardware to support DTV... and let's face it, many of these people cannot afford to or don't want to spend the money.
I think that was the original poster's point.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
What a sanctimonious load of crap! The FCC has dragged their heels on, delayed public comment on, and now come up with a truly inadequate response to, the question of Low-Power Radio in this country. And why? Because they're in the thrall of the National Association of Broadcasters, that's why. Talk about not protecting the public's interests: a few mega-corps control 80% of the public airwaves, and when the public agitates for a tiny smidgen of the airwaves back, the FCC completely caves into the lobbyists and offers us: a few 100-watt, non-commercial stations with a piddly four-mile radius of transmission. Yeah, FCC, it is your responsibility and you've blown it!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
2003 seemed like a long time in the future when they were planning this whole thing, and they figured it would be a good date to have NTSC completly phased out.
Under the current plan, the plug is to be pulled on the system in just 3 years. I seriously doubt that most people will be ready by then, and that's the issue.
"Suble Mind control? why do html buttons say submit?",
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
In the US, which AFAIK doesn't have much if any widescreen TV yet, the only `benefit' of DTV that I can see is the extra channels.
You do know that Charter is owned by Steve Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, don't you? :)
If you look at the logo, it even resembles Microsoft's logo style.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
Yeah, I noticed this about 5 seconds after I hit submit...anyway, he owns Charter, and I understand he's throwing millions of $$ at my area alone.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
I live in upper east TN (Kingsport area) and the local cable company (Intermedia, now Charter) has offered digital cable in parts of Kingsport for a year and the whole city has had it for about 8 months. We use a General Instrument box.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
Not because the TVs are so expensive, but rather the equipment necessary to transmit DTV is so incredibly expensive, even for the video industry.
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
Most stations will use 2 channels on for HDTV and one NTSC. Nobody will buy HDTV's for 4K and cable will still send out NTSC and HDTV. HDTV is a product without a market. It will be about 20 years befor it really makes a difference. BTW most stations use NTSC editors and VTR's I don't know where the 6X data is going to come from, you can't boost the image if the data is not there. So for the most part it will be like broadcasting in Stereo, it's not really Stereo but it makes the light on you TV come on. :)
It wont cost more to broadcast HDTV. but you need a new transmitter. Once that is in place you can send out NTSC and HDTV with no problem at all. I think that can send out all kinds of extra stuff with the NTSC channel because of the low bandwith NTSC signal.
I think it's nice to hear the FCC chairman has decided to act on this issue; maybe McCain is just applying some more pressure... 8)
Just because NTSC will be removed from the broadcast airwaves by 2006 does not mean it will completely die as a broadcasting format; stations which still use it should be available via cable or satellite providers. How much of the market consists of antenna-only viewers, anyways? Devices like ReplayTV and TiVo are just starting to break into the market, and they are geared towards the broadcast NTSC market exclusively.
NTSC should also continue to thrive as a home video standard, albeit the lowest one. Does anyone think the DVD collections some of us are building up now will be rendered obsolete so quickly? Next-gen TV's will have to sport some analog connections and integrated A/D converters to provide the compatibility I think a majority of the concerned public would want. Set-top boxes of both the D/A and A/D varieties will probably co-exist on the market for years before the HDTV standard (whatever it turns out to be) entrenches both the hardware/software and content sides of the market to the point that new product will simply not be made available in an analog format.
There's a void in the TV market that has yet to be agressively pursued by any of the manufacturers - an affordable ($1000) 16:9 analog set with composite video connectors that's not more than 35" diagonal! This would be a great companion for DVD since it would allow viewing of widescreen content in its native resolution (500 horizonal lines per inch, I think). Is this because the companies are too scared to enter into this markket while HDTV still looms?
---- Politics: Kissing ass and pointing blames.
Sorry, should have said just "500 lines". It was early when I posted. 8)
In fact, it looks like it's 480 lines of vertical resolution for Region 1 DVDs.
---- Politics: Kissing ass and pointing blames.
IIRC, DirecTV is working on a deal with Tivo for providing some pretty cools solutions.
load "linux",8,1
[ObFCC]
The FCC is just itching to regulate some more. The idea of a government agency (especially in the US) that would rather not regulate, except those mean nasty corporations leave us no choice would be laughable if people's thoughts didn't actually work that way.
[/ObFCC]
BTW, that's hardly the world's largest palindrome (and in fact, it's not a palindrome at all since technically, palindromes cannot contain proper nouns such as Panama). For a 540 word version of the Panama one, try here. And if you're adventurous and count foreign languages (French) there's this one which is 1247 words long. There's also a really long German one kicking around, but I can't dredge up a url.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
The difference is that I can't complain to NBC that the picture I receive from them is worse than the picture out my window. However, I CAN publically question why my PBS station is able to provide a picture an order of magnitude better than they are, and without commercials to boot.
Except that old black and white TVs could continue to receive color signals (The only difference is the color burst on the front porch, and a controlled phase angle - BTW all your tint control does is adjust the phase angle (timing) from the color burst pulse to the signal.
OLD TV sets won't be able to receive DTV - I know a bunch of people who aren't buying TVs right now because they don't want their investment to go away. Take my parents. They are happy with their 20 year old 25" set. Now it's starting to go. They want their NEXT set to last just as long. Are YOU going to be the one to tell them that they HAVE to buy 3 new sets to replace the ones they have?
There are a LOT of people I know of AARP age who are ready to bring in petitions to the courts to have cable outlawed (TV should be free). Let's face it, they DO out number US
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I agree. I haven't gone COLD turkey, but I watch about 1/2hr to 1 hr of TV a month,Usually when my wife is watching and I keep her company. My wife and I have decided that our Daughter only gets to watch TV on "special" occasions. The last of those being the annual airing of "The Grinch who Stole Christmas" The next will probably be the Valentine's day Winnie the Pooh Special. There is a good chance that'll be the next time I watch TV too.
Most TV, including the better stuff on cable, is a wasteland. I work for one of the networks, and I can't tell you when I last watched one of our shows.
READ A BOOK, it'll make you use your brain
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Digital Cable has NOTHING to do with Digital TV. These things are TOTALLY seperate. Digital cable is still the same resolution as regular tv. Digital that they are refering to is a whole new TV standard, that supports higher resolution etc.
> You used to get analog TV signals over the air for free.
No, we pay for our analogue programming, and (I think) always have done. The money goes to fund the BBC.
> Now you have to get a converter box, and you pay a fee to get digital TV signals over the air.
You have to get a converter box, yes. You also have to take out a subscription to a service, which gives you more programming as well as the fact that it's a digital service. You have to bear in mind that the UK's analogue terrestrial service consists of 5 channels, and that many people are willing to pay extra for more programming. This has been shown to work with the analogue satellite and cable TV systems that we've had for several years.
> Plus you still have that TV tax thingy, right? (license)
The government is considering the introduction of an additional charge, to be levied on top of the current licence fee (about 15-20%, I think) for digital TV. The broadcasters and manuafacturers are almost unanimously against this, as it is expected to slow the adoption of digital TV. The money raised will be going (at least in part) to the BBC to finance its digital services.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
Wouldn't mind one of those...
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
Concerning the bandwidith problem I am fairly sure that it has been done locally along with internet access over the same lines. Cox does this in the New Orleans area. They've got digital cable and Internet over the same lines. I am not familiar with the system at all so I could not give you any details about it, but it has been done.
We all need our dose of "dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama". Part of the problem or delight of running an evolved OS instead of a designed one.
I've recently discovered that even in a city like Milwaukee, there are troups of people willing to provide the "dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama" in person for about $15 US per performance. Probably less than the price of the worthless goods The Tube will program you to buy in a week.
try to relax...
We apologize for the inconvenience.
This is the paradox of early lock-in to standards. It happened here in the states for cell phones too. Europe got to see what the states did wrong, so now they get a wide choice of cool GSMs while we have to diddle along with crap tech and boring phones. But you all know this; it's not who's got the best tech, it's who can entrench it first. After that, monopsonist powers allow you to write all the rules.
Two completely unrelated points:
:-(
I live in Chicago. You'd figure that we'd be among the first to have DTV, but apparently the FCC is making us get it last because all the tall buildings in the Loop lack any more space for antennas.
Skyscrapers like the Sears Tower and the Hancock Building are totally full with radio transmitters and massive cells for cell phones. They just don't have any more room anymore.
In a few years, though, we might have another building built (1 block away from the Sears) that will not only reclaim the world's tallest label (*g*) but it'll have sufficient space for DTV transmitters.
But what I fail to understand is... why do we even need such a thing? I've never complained about my TV's picture, and Lord knows I don't want to spend more money for something I don't need.
Chances are the proponents of DTV used buzzwords like "Digital" and "TV" in the same sentence to make the FCC wet their pants in sheer joy, just so I have to drop a few hundred bucks for a new TV.
-- BlueCalx | http://nickd.org/
If it works the same way it does here then the government is busy shutting down the analogue services because it frees up more channels for mobile 'phones. Transmission licences for those are worth an excessive ammount of money.
Boreing, worthless crap progamming and way too many ads. Yawn. I don't own a boob tube now and won't in the future. What's there to watch? I'd rather spend that US$3,000 or whatever on a loaded G4. At least the net is somewhat interactive.
Well it's not as silly as all that - basicly all those standards are variations on a couple of themes and because they're all digital with enough gates and software you can do basicly anything - and since the sets are all going to be digital then so long as they build good enough scalers/filters into the sets then we can make any format look OK on almost any sized screen.
The important thing they did do was force the TV guys to finally agree to square pixels - otherwise we'd have had a really painfull TV/Computer convergence.
I predict that within 3 years we will all become armchair 'experts' on scalers - or at least at looking at a TV in the store and judging the artifacts - adverts will tout the number of taps, bits of precision, etc etc all to a public who will just buy the thing with the bigest number.
You've probably heard a big fuss about 'set top boxes' - basicly the idea is that the electronics that do smart stuff like understand all those different formats and do the pretty scaling are going to sit in a box you can replace fairly easily while the TV's just a big expensive monitor (this way you can also get a set top box to use with your old-type TV).
Of course they also want your set-top box to be your web/mail client so they can sell you a net connection thru your cable and a game console so you can lease games and a TiVo/VCR and ....
But then what we all need are open-source set-top boxes so we can download the latest TV goodies into them.
Why would I want AT&T Cable Nazis of Oakland County or the lame broadcast stations to supply me with a better picture? All I would get is great shows like 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch','Will & Grace' and local TV Y2K reports where they show stock footage of a guy with glasses on and call it a story in better picture quality anyway? First improve the quality of what is on the TV before imporving the TV itself. For example, I could play a 1993 shareware DOS game on my IBM PS/1 or on an Athlon. In the end the end though, I'd have the same experience. I can read book for the price of a DVD movie and get so much more out of it. I'd love to have a computer of the same price value as a HDTV costs today. I like to use any new products, but just making a new product off of a crappy old product does not interest me. In the end, all you have is a $109 color TV for $10,000.
How about the fact that there isn't even a consensus being reached on how to transmit DTV? The current 8VSB standard is known to be succeptible to multipath distortion (a kind of distortion caused by high frequency radio waves bouncing off of buildings and objects). Try the Sinclair Group's petition to allow broadcasts to be done in COFDM. Lots of information about this is available here.
I figure tv's will go the way of the once bandwidth increases. Well, maybe not go extinct, but blend in more with computers with one or two functions, such as browsing the internet and checking email. Figure with alot of bandwith and a good picture, you'll have your broadcasts come over the internet, like streaming audio is doing for radio stations. Like you have your major broadcasters, but you also have your choice of amatuer broadcasters (yeah, probably mostly porn) to pick from also.
I mean, this might be a few years off, but aside from work related and computer-nerdish stuff, what do you do that doesn't involve using the internet/checking email? I see the majority (no, not all) of computers sorta "dumbing down" in functionality in favor of easy interfaces and less buggy software/os's. I think that's good, because non-geeks shouldn't have to deal with that crap.
Anyone think they can make the 2006 deadline?
"when i needed you most, when i needed a friend, you let me down now, like i let you down then."
The new bandwidth features for broadcasters (line-of-sight and cable) sound good, until you think about it.
They say that the new bandwidth slots can be used:
Hm, I want to sell advertising. I can either
Oh yeah, and remember the scheduling hassle of trying to go hybrid and switching modes now and then. All four normal channels have to stop their typical streams to merge for the 90min premium showing.
HDTV will be limited to HD-DVD, HD-VCR, HD-WebTV applications for a while, I'm thinking. And oh, yeah, not until enough early-adopters (read, geeks with cash not allocated to Playstations or SIMMs for their MP3 players) go out and force their less-nerdy friends to buy them too.
[
I know telcos aren't perfect but I can tell you I have been in Pacific Bell central officess and seen how they have to subsidize AT&T virtually taking back the local phone industry while AT&T (Formerly TCI Cable) gets to have a monopoly on Cable based internet...
It is not like people copying tv shows or whatever is new. If people didn't do it why does your vcr have a record feature and a tv tuner? I mean sure you could use the record feature to copy a home movie or something but then why does it have a tuner?
The tighter they tighten their grip the more that slips through...like broken DVD encryption.
a) Things have to be let to develop "naturally"
In case of digital TV - higher picture quality
is not a holy grail - why would you want to
see in better quality whatever they show on tv
now??
b) The time has to be given for communication
industry to allow a merge of technolgies so that
tv and web would be one. Then (when the difference
betwin the website and tv channel will be
erased) and the whole thing will be fully
interactive there will be another standrad or
group thereof by themself. Forcing anything else
now will just slow this proces.
c) In the meantime making people shell out over
3000$ to watch more brainwash and hogwsh on more
channels in more color is good for anyone BUT
us people in front of the tv.
No.
We still get analog (and will continue to do so until at least 2010). If we are willing to pay an extra £10 or so (thats about $16) per month we can get digital as well. If you read my original post you'll see that the set top box is free (as in beer) so no additional hardware fee.
And yes the license fee is still in force. Given the quality of programming from the BBC vs. commercial stations I'm perfectly happy to pay it.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Color is backward-compatible with black-and-white. As stations converted to color, the old/cheap b/w sets could still pick them up - they didn't get the color information but they could watch the programs.
My understanding is this is not true of HDTV: old sets can't receive HDTV broadcasts at all, not even at NTSC resolution.
Breaking compatibility requires a lot more justification than making an improvement that's backward-compatible. I'm not sure myself that greater resolution and a sharper picture is worth it.
Lucky me, I just bought my Panasonic HDTV and now the cable industry wants to use Firewire as the standard connection for HDTV.
Of course none of the HDTVs available now have Firewire, most have either RGB or Component inputs (mine has both), so if Firewire is chosen we're screwed.
If anyone hasn't noticed, the only HDTVs being produced right now are the flagship models. Not *every* HDTV in the world will be a 60 inch tv.
The main reason for flagship only is because HDTV/DTV isn't very widespread. Why sell consumer-friendly TVs if only videophiles are going to buy them for now?
When Dolby Digital receivers first came out they were $1000+. Now that they have been out for a while, you can get a decent Dolby Digital receiver for $400. The same thing goes for DVD players.
If the FCC wants HDTV/DTV to become standard, they shouldn't yell at the manufacurers of equipment. They will jump in full time when they see a large enough market where they won't be losing money.
The only way for a large enough market to occur is for the damn stations to start converting 25%, then 50%, and so on.
'Mullethead. A hairstyle that's a way of life'
...Tolkien. The Hobbit is geared a little more for kids, but The Lord of the Rings trilogy is perfect fine, too. I think I read those books for the first time when I was 10 or so. They should be mandatory reading for any English-reading person :)
--------
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Granny will still need you to come over and hook it up for her, but she'll feed you a great dinner as always. If you have a lot of older lady relatives you can eat free for weeks.
In Nearly All Paradigms, Shift Happens.
I don't get it.
He says,
where the market does not work to promote consumer welfare, the Commission must.
and you say,
whatever happened to "protect the nations boundaries" and "protect the citizens' rights"."
It sounds to me that the Commission's mandate is exactly to 'protect the citizens' rights' when the market tries to abuse them.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Completely off topic, but...
Madam in eden, I'm Adam
Don't Panic...
How do you figure that out? The uk went from ~400 lines in b/w to ~700 lines in colour, with a picture quality NTSC has never come close to. I rather think that the public did benefit quite a lot.
Besides, my digital terrestrial recevier has an RF out and a SCART socket that simply connect to a standard analogue tv/vcr setup, it also has a DVB socket in the back for future upgrades.
- The digital channels are compressed--and you can see some of the artifacts from the lossy sampling.
- Since the digital cable box is needed to see a digital cable channel, kiss goodbye the ability to watch one channel and record another on the VCR (if they're both digital).
- You say you bought yourself a cool TV with picture-in-picture? Ha ha, you wasted your money; check out that nice blue rectangle insert on your screen.
- It is yet another box eating up space, and yes, it runs hot, so be careful where you put it.
- Yet another remote...oops, it doesn't understand my TV or receiver/amp. Maybe I should build a "remote chain" by analogy with a "key chain."
I'm very disappointed, but thanks to AT&T Cable (formerly TCI) having a city-granted monopoly (and living in a condo), I have no choice if I want a decent selection of programming.The Supreme Court itself declared timeshifting to be a perfectly legitimate use of the VCR, back when the TV and Movie people were trying to destroy the entire industry. I certainly hope that the FCC will not permit a copy-protection system that prevents timeshifting of high quality digital content. Copyright provides only a limited set of rights -- not absolute control over content.
This is ridiculous. Just because I subscribe to a specific cable company (like I have a choice, since they are virtually monopolies), I must use my cable company's scheduling channel. This is ridiculous!
FCC Chairman Kennard should tell the cable companies to forget it...they have no right to control how the customer gets scheduling information. The FCC is supposed to be on the customer's side. What part of this doesn't the FCC get?
The FCC simply does not get it. They want strong copy protection. If DVD hadn't already been a viable medium, the FCC would have tried to make DIVX the way to the future. Certainly Chairman Kennard seems to think that it was a good idea. Chairman Kennard probably would have tried to kill the VCR, given half a chance. Now we will have TVs that don't permit us to timeshift content, or have multiple viewings.
"IPTV"? The FCC chairman should do his homework before coining new buzzwords that are actually registered product names. IP/TV is Cisco's IP multicast video product. Next thing you know, someone will appropriate "DNS" and give it a different meaning.
Lack of originality implies lack of vision. Ignorance implies laziness. Either way, it doesn't do much for his aura of expertise.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman William Kennard Friday (Jan. 7) directed cable and consumer electronics industries to sort out compatibility specifications for a cable-ready digital TV by April or the FCC may issue its own ruling to resolve the matter.
"I have directed the FCC to draft proposed rules for digital television compatibility standards," Kennard said here. "If industry can't solve these problems by April we will be prepared to act."
The two key "sticking points" holding back the roll out of digital TV, Kennard said, consist of an agreement between cable operators and TV makers about a physical connection for cable-ready DTVs and a means of delivering digital programming guides and information over cable. Kennard fell short of drawing a line in the sand about another contentious issue-whether cable companies "must carry" the high definition digital TV signals generated by terrestrial broadcasters. "
So, despite all of the slashdot readers who are confused about the differences between digital TV and HDTV, the FCC's position was about the physical cable connection and about the program guide menu. That's all.
The picture quality is the same, interface has the same look and feel, and the service so far has been good. The one drawback is that even with cable ready televisions, you need the special converter to get the signal and you need one for each TV, cant use "Rabbits" or anything like that. But hey, it is the same as using the dish, and dollar for dollar it's almost 1/2 the cost!
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
i work for AT&T (@Home support), and our network is all digital. that is, the parts of the network that provide net connections are digital. the max ive ever heard anyone getting is about 3Mbps. one lady said she got 5 once, but she only has 4 people on her node. keep in mind that we dont cap download speeds, but we do limit upstream to 128Kbps in some areas
you still have a black ad white tv ? :)
:P
damn dude, take a jump ahead to the 1970's
seriously, why would you want a black and white tv ? the only person i know who has one is my grandmother and she keeps it in the closet and never uses it (she now has a colour).
unless your colour blind or an extreme fundamentalist, i dont see the big deal in upgrading.
unless theres some huge price difference.
ill GIVE you a color tv
around here, there is USWEST and AT&T
:)
uswest has local phone service
att has local phone service
uswest has high-speed internet (dsl)
att has high-speed internet (@home)
uswest can use the bandwidth to send cable tv
att OWNS the cable. we laid the lines back when we were TCI. there was a vote in november to see whether att should renew its franchise aggreement with the city, and att won that vote, hands down.
we have to pay the city to keep access to our own lines. and they make alot of money off of it.
meanwhile we cant touch uswests lines (locally speaking)
seems fair to me. i work for att, but i hate my job so you cant hold that against me
Most folks missed a good point on DigitalTV... Cable companies in my area are converting now.. Its really REALLY cool. Not only do you get Digital TV if you choose to have it. They have these nice set-top boxes that really benefit from DigitalTV services. Lots of programming information (Tv show times) Cable Internet just around the corner. SO Digital is good. Its only 40USD / Month. Is that TO expensive? I know people who pay 4 times that for an ISDN because they are so hard up for high speed internet in this area.
Like standardize all digital data and binaries that travel between computers.
That is, it should always be possible for my machine to examine a digital stream (at least on the commercial side of things) and be able to detect exactly what that stream is.
I will never understand how the FCC did such a great job on radio and TV, but completely and utterly failed the planet on computer intercommunication.
Given the US, you can't buy a standard TV that won't read and decode a channel of information. But look at PeeCee's -- none of them can talk together, unless everything is "just so". What a waste.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
The public got no real benefit then, but the few poor souls who already had a tv could no longer use it.
So perhaps you are conditioned to think this is OK.
NTSC works just fine, and this change provides no benefit to the public, just to the manufacturers of the new system. The broadcast industry has just taken the practices of the software industry (Mandatory software upgrades to use the new file format) and applied them to hardware.
The issue with TV today is content, not the format of delivery.
Hidden Win2K Menu
Now you have to get a converter box, and you pay a fee to get digital TV signals over the air.
Plus you still have that TV tax thingy, right? (license)
And you are better off how? (I'm sure you must be, to do this, but the mechanics escape me).
Hidden Win2K Menu
If something better came along that does not break compatibility with our existing equipment, I don't think you would be hearing these (justified, IMNSHO) complaints.
Hidden Win2K Menu
Now that's funny. He makes a post satirizing the previous one, and absolutely nobody caught it (the discussion about color TV being backwards compatible to black & white was interesting too).
As far as digital vs. analog, digital takes less than half as much bandwidth as analog -- this is the benefit. The FCC is trying to get rid of legacy systems and everyone seems to flame them for it.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
We moved about 6 months ago and never subscribed to cable or other TV service at the new house. The upside: my kids aren't watching all the violent crap they used to. The downside: we're probably spending more on books that we used to on cable, and it takes alot of time to keep going to the library and the book store.
-Bill H.
PS: Any good science fiction suggestions for an 8 year old boy? I'm not sure what to get him beyond Asimov...
How is this a bad thing?
It may be expensive now, but the earlier DTV is standardized, the earlier prices will go down, and the earlier everyone will have high bandwidth lines going into their house. This will also force the cable companies to get their ass moving on laying out higher bandwidth cables. It may be costly to them at the beginning, but it'll eventually pay off anyway.
FCC is doing the right thing. This is one good way to get the industry to move ahead.
Once HDTV-capable sets become affordable, there will be a demand for HDTV broadcasts. Until HDTV-capable televisions stop costing thousands of dollars, there is little or no incentive for HDTV broadcasts to be made. Now there is an incentive for high definition filming to be done. That's because DVD players are getting cheaper, and have finally become affordable. Like anything else, the more it costs, the fewer people will buy it, unless it's a virtual necessity like telephone service or even (to a certain extent) cable television.
Some comments:
"Right now only microwave satillite has the capacity to stream 19Mbps per channel to everyone on your block."
First, what the heck is microwave satellite? And since when is satellite restricted to 19.2Mbit? 19.2Mbit is the limit for ATSC digital terrestrial. Anyway - Wrong. Terrestrial ATSC digital is being tested in a lot of areas. Thats 19.2Mbits to your BUNNY antenna that cost $5 at Radio Shack. Sure you will need a new converter box but hey you have a cable box, don't you? Same box, different innards, premium price of a few $ more after the usual inception of new technology hike.
"Oh yeah, broadcasters CAN as an option broadcast NTSC...does that seem like a bullshit plan to anyone else?"
Hello, do you think there is infinite space in the spectrum to carry all NTSC and DTV signals? The space has to be reappropriated. This is not some way to screw you over. Please.
"Digital broadcasting needs entirely new equipment and that equipment costs money."
Bunny antenna to your tv. Cost: $5. Set top box with conversion for display on SD tv. Cost: Probably a few $ more on rental per month over your cable box. Sure, you won't get the resolution (you'll need a new TV) but PLEASE don't tell me you are whining about the cost of higher resolution on your TV, Mr. Linux Computer Freak who must have 1600x1200 desktops and the latest hardware.
"So, if you think you are going to be seeing a better TV picture any time soon, think again. Except to spend lots of money to upgrade your equipment, but with zero reward."
Bullshit. Let's take ATSC. 1 channel, 19.2Mbits. Expect to see two standard def signals in this space during the day, and 1 HDTV signal during premium hours. Expect the remaining Mbit of space to be used for high-speed data services. Stick a PCI card in your PC, and get webcasts and other cool stuff which blows VBI datacasts like Intel Intercast away. I know this, since I work on this.
And NEWS flash, the quality over NTSC will definitely be better. Compare 1080i signals to a 525 line resolution NTSC signal. You seem to confuse the issues of MPEG compression and resolution.
There IS a limit to which you can drop the MPEG encoding on HD or SD signals before it falls apart.
In short I haven't seen such a lot of misguided drivel in a long time on slashdot. You guys really need to pony up your knowledge before just screaming bloody murder.
"The study finds that the Sinclair demonstration has provided useful insight into certain indoor reception conditions, particularly with regard to strong multipath conditions, and possible deficiencies of some early DTV receiver designs. However, the study concludes that the multipath reception problems identified by Sinclair are solvable with improved adaptive equalizer performance and that a well-designed 8-VSB receiver should be able to provide satisfactory reception at the Sinclair locations. It further notes that signal strength and immunity to interference from impulse noise are also important factors in successful indoor reception and that 8-VSB may have some advantage over COFDM with regard to these factors."
From the FCC mouth right after Sinclair demonstrated the shortcomings of early 8VSB.
COFDM will probably stay in the mobile distribution arena I would bet.
And 8VSB is pretty well close to the reception of NTSC.
Is that the FCC isn't acting in the interests of the people at all. In fact the only reason they are doing this is because the process is taking so long, certain cable companies are the ones who are causing the hold up. The FCC has sold out to a special interest, one of the players involved is forcing the developement of a standard, the one that they want to be adopted. The process has been circumvented in their favor. Either way though the consumers get shafted because the FCC doesn't work for us, it works for The Corporations.
Isn't that the idea of the X-Box and the psx2. To create a box that is the central entertainment unit, bringing together gaming, dvd, TV, and the internet all to one box? Eventually I imagine there will be one data line which feeds the house. All information will be sent thru it. Instead of phone, cable, water, electricity, gas, DSL/cable it'll be dataline, water, gas, electricity. With recent deregulations so many corporations are merging, perhaps it'll ultimatly come down to one MegaCorp that you pay and they provide all services to a house, all the utilities, communications, garbage pickup, gardening services. That seems to be the direction things are heading in.
I've noticed weird dithering artifacts on the digital cable that I've seen. And changing channels goes SO SLOW once you get into the higher numbers on the box. Like changing from channel 350 to 351, at first the screen will be all black and then slowly parts of the black will drop off and the image will appear. It makes flipping through channels a real chore. I suspect this is a problem in the box, it probably doesn't have enough processing power :(
Perhaps this could lead to the death of television. Perhaps everyone (or a significant majority) will just give up on it and move to the internet. Perhaps the switch to DTV will really be what turns the internet into the dominant form information/entertainment.
It's a little different in America. DTV costs a good amount more than regular cable service. Also I'm not sure about increased image quality, I've noticed weird dithering artifacts as well as very slow response when changing channels in the higher numbers. The guide system is nice, and having such a variety of channels is good, but even with hundreds of channels it's still so hard to find something good on :( Another thing is the plans that I have seen don't allow you to pick and choose which channels you want. There are 3 tiers, the bottom cheapo tier which is basically the same as cable service without any movie channels. The mid range which is all the non-movie channels and then a half dozen of the most popular movie channels, and then the top tier which is every channel. Some places on the top tier they also give you a free pay per view movie a month.
Speaking as someone who has a 19" black and white portable as my (nearly) only television set, I find your comment humorous. I had the set on most of the day yesterday and watched the latest Simpson's episode as well as other programming (Xena got pregnant, etc.).
My other television set is a 3" active matrix color LCD portable set.
I don't hold much stock in that televsion stuff. The cabinet the tv sits on is in the way of the bookshelf in my living room (one of four) that has the reference books on it. It's quite an annoyance. I get tired of TV and consign it to storage in the garage fairly often.
I'm not a luddite, though. My computer has a nice Sony 19" monitor (and the second best has an NEC 17" monitor). I just think most programming sucks. The new show they played last night ("some name or other in the middle" I think it was called) seemed like a new low in quality.
Shoot your television.
Open a book and render some REALLY good 3-D animation, in wetware.
With the increased bandwidth, and ultimately the end of "broadcasting" (because people will choose what they want to watch by picking from a menu and enjoying the video stream they select when they want to select it) comes the death of the rationale for "timeshifting."
If you can que up the program when you want, starting at exactly when you want, what is your rationale for needing to "time shift" the program?
Ooops, I guess maybe it wasn't all just about timeshifting after all.
BTW, has anyone noticed that the HRRC (Home Recording Rights Association) seems to be dead? No new content on their page for some time now.
Third, where the market does not work to promote consumer welfare, the Commission must. That's my job. It's in the law. It's our responsibility, and the public rightfully relies on the FCC when the market does not protect the public's interests.
God, that's scary... the whole idea that the privilege (not right!) to watch TV is something that the government thinks it is their job to dictate. I guess it's only a free market until the government feels like doing something else.
I would think the only place the government would have any say at all over is what bands this digital TV should broadcast over.
I dunno... maybe it's just a knee-jerk reaction, but whatever happened to "protect the nations boundaries" and "protect the citizens' rights". It seems like there's much better things we could be spending our time on... it seems like every time the government makes a standard, it turns into a joke (can we say OSI? :).
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
I don't know about other areas, but in upstate NY, Time Warner is going to get the sh*t kicked out of them by the digital satellite companies unless they charge LESS for DTV.
Why?
Because the satellite systems are already digital, and are much cheaper than even analog cable service. Dish Network is $30/month for 100 channels plus 40 music channels and amazing quality. Time Warner in upstate NY is $40/month for 63 ugly-looking channels.
Admittedly, the satellite vendors have one disadvantage - while the new small-dish systems have dropped the price quite a bit, you're looking at a minimum of $150 for a basic 1-TV setup, and $300 for a 2-TV setup, with $100 for each additional TV.
BTW, when I refer to "satellite", I'm speaking of the new guys like Dish and DirecTV, not the "old-skool" big-dish systems.
Time Warner is *afraid* of satellite, their only way to battle it is an all-out FUD war, which they've begun in Ithaca already.
Not that I believe any of it. In my new apartment next year, we're going to Dish. (My uncle has it and loves it.)
URLS: http://www.directv.com/ and http://www.dishtv.com/ - I personally get a better impression of Dish than DirecTV
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
After going through hoops with TCI/ATT in an attempt to get Digital Cable, I don't want HDTV/DTV. Why?
I'll simplify this. Because your going to get screwed by the cable companies. Take my Digital Cable fun as an example.
I have xDSL at home, ummm addictive bandwidth. Then I decided I wanted TCI/ATT Digital Cable. Guess what. The analog modem in the Digital Cable box won't work in my house. No I have to get a seperate analog phone line if I want all the Digital goodness that TCI will give me. Even better...lets spam your phone with calls about @Home once we know your a DSL user.
Now with all this "interactive" menuing and channel guides that you get with DSS and Digital Cable, your going to need analog phone lines aren't you?
I don't want the hastle of a new medium. I don't want to buy boxes for my current TV, I don't want to have my boxes jacked into analog phone lines that I'm going to be shelling $14 a month for, and I really don't want to have to deal with a freaking antenna for HDTV.
I would like Star Wars and the Indiana Jones movies on DVD though
except that I have heard of no plans for a 27 mb/s cable modems. I have a cable modem now, and it's fast enough(a little over 100K/sec upstream, 700K/sec downstream at peak)
But hey, the faster the better(not that most sites can dish out close to even 700K/sec)
I can't comment directly on DTV, but I can compare DSS to broadcast. There is a tremendous difference. For worst case (channel 5 in Atlanta), it's the difference between clear to the limits of the TV itself vs. practically unviewable (the all important X-files is on 5!). On other channels where reception is good anyway, there is still a distinct improvement in sharpness and color. This is noticable on a 25 inch screen at 10 feet (probably also at 20 but it's a small room so I don't know).
Before DSS, we had analog cable. It was SLIGHTLY better than broadcast on the worst stations, and not as good as broadcast on the best (which is sad really). It also went out a lot (according to our neighbors, it still does).
Digital cable uses mpeg as well, but based on reports here, I'm guessing they use a smaller bitrate. On DSS, there ARE occasional mpeg artifacts, in particular with bright flashes with lots of detail on the screen, but it's a lot less than the constant problems with either analog cable or broadcast.
Short summary, digital can be great, but it's dependant on decisions made by the provider.
I work for Scientific Atlanta and we're quite proud of those boxes. Nine months ago, we had to virtually give the first boxes away. Now we can't ship them fast enough. We've already shipped over a million. And you should know that there are going to be a lot of great things that you can do with those boxes in the future. Wish I could tell you more.
In the rest of the world, GSM rules because their local legislature made it so - as the sole standard for their country. I can call anywhere in Australia and many other contries without changing my handset or the SIM card in it - I just turn it on and it works. I can drive from Melbourne to Cairns (about 4000 km by road) and have full service along practically the entire route with my 100 gm GSM handset. I can change carriers but retain my handset if I wanted to. I can take my SIM card (about 2 grams in weight) with me and use a friend's phone in Singapore or Scotland if that tickled my fancy.
In the US, you can barely use some mobile phones within your own city, let alone another state. CDMA, TDMA, AMPS, PCS, and a little GSM thrown in; you name an half assed protocol, and the US has it. It's bad for consumers.
Another example, already seen in this discussion is AM stereo. In Australia, FM Stereo was made mandatory with one single high quality format. It has been so successful, that today no one listens to AM for music. The government made a lot of money from AM music stations willing to move to FM to retain their listeners.
Then the govt experimented and was burnt with self regulation, and the result was AM stereo. Complicated by two competing standards, consumers didn't buy the sets and car manufacturers settled on CQAM, but it was too late. I am not aware of any stations still transmitting in AM stereo after less than 15 years after its introduction.
As a consumer, don't be afraid of a single standard. Be afraid of a single carrier, a single cable company, a single software company.
Andrew van der Stock
Whatever one may feel about the role of government and the FCC, it is nevertheless true that this is one area in which competition has failed in the US. Technically speaking, the US TV system has been *way* behind Europe's PAL and MAC for decades, and now that Europe has gone digital, the US has just dropped another step behind.
Why market forces have failed utterly in this regard I have no idea, but they have, and it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that the US government is tired of 3rd world country status and is telling the FCC to do something about it. Heck, *somebody* needs to break the logjam. It's not as if the market hasn't had long enough to do it itself.
Why has the market failed? Is it sewn up in cartels perhaps, and not actually free? Are Warner and Co to blame, seeing profits continue to roll in over the old system and hence not wanting to invest in new infrastructure? Whatever the reason, something pathological has happened there. Hopefully it'll get sorted out now.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Being screwed by your cable company isn't going to change until something new like digital TV is available and deliverable by competitors. That's a result of the "free market" in cable being free only in name, not in reality, because market forces don't work properly when only a single provider at a time can deliver cable and services to your door.
You say you don't want multiple feeds in, but keeping everything separate works in your favour: when all communication goes through a single point, whoever operates the medium has you by the balls. That's why your cable operator can afford to give you crap service in the first place. Put up a dish and an antenna, and suddenly the cable operator has to wake up to a massive loss in profits, or else.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You're completely mistaken. The Internet runs on a single basic networking standard, namely IP, which is universal regardless of the delivery mechanism (Ethernet, ISDN, PSTN, ATM, frame relay, xDSL, etc). Without IP as a universal compatibility layer to which everyone subscribes, we'd be nowhere. (All the non-standards you mention are layered on top of IP.)
There is nothing to take the place of IP in the TV world, so unless some standard is agreed the US is going rapidly nowhere in this area. The FCC understands standards, so as long as they don't go further and try to regulate content, their intervention would do the whole US TV scene a massive service.
Alternatively of course, the US could continue to be a 3rd world country when it comes to TV. Your choice. Europe has for decades been laughing at the US backwater, quite rightly (PAL and MAC are massively better than NTSC), and now that Europe's gone digital, the laughter is deafening. Is that how you want things to stay?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Here where I live, cable modems are a myth. Other people have them. Time Warner here is sitting on its ass doing nothing about "digital cable" (saw a commercial for it... once.) and two way cable modems are a joke. Meanwhile, Bellsouth is cleaning house with a well built ADSL system, and good tech support. Mine kicks major butt when I'm in linux.
I read on ABCnews that the audience went dead silent when he told them they had to put up some standards or get regulated and set a date. I figure it is about time someone tells those greedy broadcasters to quit thinking with their wallets and get moving. If we wait for them to bring about this super clear TV revolution you'll be old and grey. And Broke.
Ironically, I've seen HDTV here in Jackson. The local PBS station has a digital system. Just no one to broadcast to. You can sit in their lobby and watch super clear images for hours...
Any good science fiction suggestions for an 8 year old boy?
;)
The Stainless Steel Rat series. Big fan of that at age 8. I'd also recommend Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and possibly the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I read 1984 when I was 9, but I don't necessarily recommend Orwell at that age
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
Nah, I like my WWII/Guns/Mystery channels, PBS, and my DVD collection. Still, my next set will come sans tuner and fully VGA/HDTV compatible. It's looking like Sony's VW10HT.
Your Working Boy,
You forgot to mention that at 8 years old you'll understand less than half of the jokes. But most of them will still be fun.
;) ;)
Perhaps, but what I've found over the years is that my favorite things (HHG, Python, Discworld, etc) got better over time as I learned more and could see more each time I reread or reviewed the stuff. I could never figure out who the hell Reginald Maudlin was and why Pythons would rip on him so, until I learned more.. And gods, imagine being a history major and being able to appreciate Holy Grail or Life of Brian on a whole different level after studying the Arthur legends or Roman Judea.. Hell, I got an A on a paper for my Roman Empire class writing about Life of Brian...
MST3k also does this for me a bit, but I got into it late and thus know almost every riff ref
Your Working Boy,
In the interest of accuracy, you'll actually be forced to buy a new tuner to watch broadcast TV.
If, when DTV finally arrives, it should come in a form that makes it difficult to record off-air broadcasts or limits the number of playbacks...then I won't be having one in my house, that's all. It's a matter of principle. Who needs TV anyway.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The original plan was to move all television stations to a smaller UHF band, freeing up the VHF channels and some of the UHF channels. It now looks like at least some of the VHF channels will remain allocated to television.
The FCC wants to auction off some of the recovered channels and reallocate some of the channels to other services, such as land mobile.
The television broadcasters would have lost even more spectrum without HDTV. A digital SDTV (standard definition) system would have greatly reduced their spectrum requirements.
The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) was originally interested in HDTV as a means of protecting their spectrum allocations from other services (Motorola and land mobile). They needed to give the FCC a reason why it shouldn't reallocate large portions of the sparsely occupied UHF band to other services.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
For anyone interested in the history of HDTV, I recommend the book "Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television" by Joel Brinkley (ISBN 0-15-100087-5). It is an interesting account of how money and politics, not technical merit, were responsible for the creation of HDTV.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
AM Stereo got shot down because the people who own the FM stations also own the larger AM stations. Allowing every religious and foreign language station to broadcast in 'hi-fi' would have killed the market value of the FM stations, so the station owners kept AM stereo in the bottle.
For a few years in the 1980s, American car companies shipped AM Stereo capable recievers. Most people didn't notice, however, because nobody tried to broadcast hifi pop music on AM.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Blame the radio industry, not the FCC.
It's not the government's place to write and mandate an AM standard, no more than it is the government's place to write and mandate a PC99 standard.
I mean, what if they required all computers to sell Windows 98 as an option?
Just give me my Star Trek reruns, VH1's Rock Show and Behind the Music, and I'm pretty much set...
Also, is this difference something you can see from 10 - 20 feet away, or do you have to be sitting right in front of it to bask in its digital superiority?
______________________________________
um, sigs should be heard and not seen?
rooooar
It's inconceivable that broadcasters would simply stick with a single NTSC-quality signal and lease out the remaining bandwidth for wireless data. Who would buy it? It is still a one-way path from the transmitter to you.
/SARCASM
Um, gee, the wireless communications market is only hotter then the core of the sun right now. I can't imagine what anyone would want all that bandwidth for.
There is precisely one force driving any company: Money. Broadcast TV currently gets its money from advertising dollars. Will a high-definition signal pull in more ad viewers? No, people go for the programming. They want their ER and Ally McBeal. They don't care if it is broadcast in mono, stereo, or surround sound. They also don't care about the number of vertical scan lines. If they don't care, the advertisers don't care, and that means there is no good reason to offer HDTV, especially when you compare it to the previously noted white-hot wireless communications market.
Last night's X-files was available as hi-def TV to those who had digital TVs in the big markets.
I fail to see what that proves. All it says is they are willing to float a trial balloon to see what happens.
When the digital TV conversion is complete, you will see either the wide-screen HDTV picture or you will have four channels to choose from instead of one.
As has been observed by just about everybody, we don't need more channels, we need better content. (We being the American Public(TM), not the broadcasting industry.)
There are far more stations converting to digital than industry forecasts expected and the FCC Orders required.
The stations will have to convert to digital to pull off the swindle anyway, so that proves nothing.
I'd like to hope that we all end up living in a shiny happy world of HDTV, but the cynic in me thinks the All-Mighty Buck will take precedence.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
As if it was that much more expensive to make a reprogrammable decoding unit.
We get along pretty well on the internet with several video, graphic, and audio "standards", because we need only download a new plugin. It could work the same way with HDTV.
Anyway, I think the big problem right now is the price of the display itself. An HDTV is a television-sized display with computer-monitor resolution. Given the price of even a tiny 21" monitor, is it any surprise that HDTV is still too damned expensive?
If the FCC had gotten it's act together in the mid-late 80s we would be done with the conversion by now, but they didn't so we get to go through it now (now that there are three or four TVs per home...hmm...).
That's because they have avoided doing any regulating and have waited for the market to sorts things out, which it couldn't.
+&x
Of course, it's an open question whether HDTV is actually a good idea. Consumers don't like superior tech when it's too expensive.
hmmm, new HDTV set, or, a new car, hmmmm...
+&x
Look carefully and you will see that the protection of content is the stumbling block. Again and again more and more often we are seeing this. Will it change? Or will we change? Something is going to change.
It seems that in some sence the means and modes of production are comming into conflict. Could we be looking at a world changing change (revolution) in our time?
My town just started offering digital cable recently, and I've noticed a dramatic decrease in the quality of my normal old cable. Specifically, it's that kind of "see through" effect, where objects going horizontally across the screen can be seen through similarly colored objects (read: people) in front of them.
I'm under the impression that this is due to the compressions algorithms used -- the cable company is using some lossy compression to try and use less bandwidth (although Comcast blantantly denies any ghosting, shadows, or other image problems either exisiting or being their fault). It's not like I never noticed these before; it's just that the quality has gotten much, MUCH worse since digital cable began being offered. They're pobably trying to compress the image more, but I doubt that the occurance is just a coincidence.
My problem is this: While many companies and industries are using digital this and digital that ernestly, others are using it for profit. Do I really need a HDTV? I'm perfectly satisfied with my 640x480 broadcasts - there's no way I'll pay hundreds (and, not too long ago, thousands) of dollars more for a higher quality broadcast. Does anyone really expect to be able to buy a cheap TV like the ones today and a cheap digital-to-analog converter 5 years from now?
This is all just an exuse for the entire industry to go out and charge me more. Different companies are backing different standards depending on what's in their own interests, not what's best for the consumer. Frankly, I think that we're better off without some of these "standards" that are being tossed around.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
I read the article and thought it was great, but I think it was overlooking a key player-- Public TV. Since public TV doesn't have the same motivations for wussing out on HDTV, they ARE likely to take full advantage of their HDTV spectrum. When consumers see a fantastically better picture on PBS than on MSNBC, they'll want to know why. Look for the big networks to try and smear public TV Real Soon Now.
yes it is. I don't know what the USB port is for, but Time Warner said that once the entire infastructure is digital the box will be my cable modem too.
Yep Videoway is going out... They've already started to rent -- you guessed it -- Digital TV set-top boxes.
I've seen the results... Hoo boy! Artifact city! I can't possibly imagine over-the-aerial HDTV working with all the ghosting, click-and-pop every time someone turns on a light... and the interference caused by microwaves and blenders in your home.
Rabbit ears suck! That's why they invented cable for crissakes. Now they want to go back?!?
---
You're confusing HDTV and DTV.
HDTV what you're talking about. HDTV televisions are very expensive, and the high bandwith requirement is a major problem.
DTV is another thing completely. DTV will work with any television you throw at it, using a receiver provided by your cable company. It gives you superior image quality when compared to analog TV, makes channel pirating almost impossible, lets you have a lot of value added services (like digital music channels, pay per view, nice on screen TV guides...)
DTV isn't more expensive than analog is. Here, in Quebec City, somebody who had base analog service (about 35 CDN) will be able to go with DTV for 2$ extra. That includes a DTV receiver box and a choice of channels. With analog, you can only have preselected channels. With DTV, you get 16 base channels and you can choose 15 channels (with the base plan, it costs extra for extra channels) out of about 40. DTV is good for everybody, the consumer and the broadcasters, as it lets the customer choose the channels they want to get. No more Food network if you don't want it.
HDTV is another beast entirely.
"the FCC doesn't want to dictate industry standards"
Can't they learn from their own poor decisions??
I remember them saying the exact same thing with AM Stereo, with the result being five different standards and fragmented technology. No single standard was ever adopted, receivers were expensive if you could find them, and nobody gave a care. In the end their still is no AM Stereo worth mentioning.
So maybe that's why I am so pissed at hearing this statement from the FCC??
I'm seeing a lot of confusion in this thread between digital cable, DTV, HDTV, new sets, old sets etc. I have digital TV here in the UK (we've had it for about a year now) and so although YMMV I'd like to tell you all how it works here.
First off, the DTV we get is NOT high definition. It is better quality, but that's due to a less lossy broadcast method. Basically when you subscribe to one of the digital services they give you a set top box which takes the digital signal and coverts it to PAL (or in the US case NTSC, or french SECAM etc). This then plugs into the back of your normal TV set. In my case I use a seperate RGB feed via SCART because RF sucks, but you can use RF is you really want.
The picture quality is a lot better than analog broadcast, it's like watching DVD vs VHS. The signal going into the back of your TV is the same format (PAL) but the quality is better because of the quality of the source. There are also more channels, because as someone pointed out, over here rather than getting the same number of channels but in increased resoloution, we get more normal-res channels.
A quick rundown of services available:
* Digital Terrestrial : This is run by a company called ON Digital, they transmit a digital signal over standard terrestrial airwaves. You use your existing antenna and just plugin their box. You get about 10-15 premium channels.
* Digital Satellite : The main european satellite broadcaster Sky run a digital service which is quickly taking over from their old analog service. This offers up to about 300 channels including audio only, foreign language etc. The downside is you need to install a small dish to pick up the signal. This is however free if you subscribe.
* Digital Cable : I'm not sure if this is totally up and running yet, certainly the slowest to arrive. Cable has never been as big in the UK as satellite and the infrastructure is rather crap. Nonetheless digital cable offers similar service levels to satellite, no need for a dish (ugly!) and also broadband internet access which is still not really available over here.
So to round up - from our experience if you need new equipment (such as set top boxes) the companies give them away. They started off charging but as soon as one company gave them away they all did The only investment you might want to make is for a widescreen TV, a lot more broadcasts are in 16:9 format now because they have spare channels, so you can have a 4:3 and 16:9 of the same film for instance. Also with DVD coming along widescreen is a Good Thing (tm) in general. And the picture quality is better, but it's not up to the levels of HDTV (which will require a new TV).
If you have any questions feel free to post...
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Well, go to Europe and watch some PAL analog TV then - a lot better than NTSC. Then watch the same PAL analog TV with a 100Hz TV - wow! Now watch DVD piped through Svideo or RGB to that 100Hz widescreen TV - we're really getting interested now!
Now imagine DTV and HDTV, more resolution (HDTV) than DVD, TV sets that don't even convert to analog before displaying (Plasma TV, anyone?).
Why you need anything better than that _incredibly_ crappy NTSC shit?
Because of the same f*cking reasons you don't use 8086 computers, black&white TVs, crap AM radio (oh wait, maybe you still do .. ), analog cellphone systems (damn, you do)!
I'm happy I don't live in that 3rd world country called USA - technology from the 60's all the way through.
Flamebait? Yes, but only if you're moderating with your personal US ego in front of your eyes.
it's in my head
Am I the ONLY one who read this positively?
Say what you will about the FCC, and some of their silly decisions in the past. On the whole, this guy seems to 'get it.' Consider this summary of his speech;
1) The industry has not been working for the consumer.
2) The industry has been working for their own ends.
3) By working towards their own ends, the industry hasn't developed any followed standards.
4) By working towards their own ends, the industry has harmed the consumer.
5) If the industry doesn't get off their asses ASAP, the FCC, backed by the US gov't, will kick said asses around, on behalf of the consumer.
Strikes me as a decent kind of guy.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Wow, so I guess all copying is illegal now. How many times must something be broken until they just give up? I'm tired of them trying to force this 'pay per play' shit down my throat. If that's the motivation behind digital tv, then I don't want any part in it.
We've had DTV for over a year now. The set top boxes are 'free' (if you take a subscription to the pay channels) and the integrated sets are now down to £500 (about $750) for a 28" set.
THe EU/UK govmt decided to stop messing around waiting for the world to agree on a standard and went with the UK system - a little like they've done with GSM phones already mentioned.
Switch-off for the analogue transmitters has been set to around 2010 (based on 90% of the population having got DTV recievers and 99% of the population being capable of recieving it then a hard will be set 2 years in the furture)
For somethings the govnmt HAS to set the goals, thats what they are there for - a central body to HELP co-ordinate things and if neseccary force change.
I have been a beta tester for digital cable in my area (eastern TN) for a little over 6 months now. The cable box I use is made by Scientific Atlanta. You can see it here. Anyway... the point of this post is that I'm not waiting for the digital infastructure to be in place so I can get more channels or better picture, I want the 27mb/s that Time Warner is promising once the entire area is digital.
I'm near Salt Lake City, and we've already got it. Cable went digital here a while back, and all of the local broadcasters (but one, I believe) teamed up to build a common HDTV broadcast center they all send their signal from, drastically reducing their costs and speeding adoption. Since they're broadcasting from a common location, it will also be a lot easier to receive, since you point the antenna at one peak to receive all the stations. I already have my HDTV (they're sweet, as long as the feed is S-video, progressive, or 1080i!), and will soon have my receiver (as soon as Toshiba sells the one to match my TV). Normally I avoid local channels, but it's hard to pass them up when they all go digital simultaneously.
Time Warner has been advertising digital cable here in Rochester for months. And I gather from the recent ads that they are installing now. I can just picture the standard being something different and costing some of the cable providers bigs bucks; a cost that will undoubtedly get passed along. As for me, I want a guarantee that when I go to digital cable that under no circumstances will I ever get the Golf Channel. If that happens, I won't get a single word out of my dad when he comes to visit.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I get your point but it isn't a good one. The FCC never mandated a switch from bw to color. Broadcasters were simply meeting a consumer demand. But there is little apparent demnd for digital tv. Also, unlike color/bw, the new digital tv sets are not automatically compatible with the old standard. You have to buy an expensive additional device for that.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Digital cable has nothing to do with the Digital TV that the FCC is considering regulations for. Digital Cable simply converts regular analog TV signals to digital and then transmits this signal to cable boxes at people's homes. The cable box then converts the compressed digital signal to analog and sends it to the television. This makes the picture marginally clearer and allows cable companies to transmit more channels in the same bandwidth, but does not provide the major improvement in picture quality that High Definition digital TV provides.
The FCC is impatient because they granted broadcasters an extremely lucrative block of frequencies in return for broadcasters using the frequencies to broadcast digital high definition television. Believe me, nothing compares to a high definition signal. Simply amazing!
Sig goes here
Hi, I'm Venomous Louse. I haven't owned a TV for five years now, and while it sometimes sucks a bit not to be able to rent movies, I've yet to lose any sleep about that. The fact is, TV sucks. Try not watching TV for a year, and then turn one on and watch a few commercials. It's like opening a door into an insane asylum, for God's sake! I am telling you, it is not normal to sit in a chair watching perfect strangers scream at you about how you should buy things that you don't care about. It may or may not be identical to North Korean mind-control techniques, but it's close enough to chill my blood and no mistake. In the rare intervals when they're not screaming at you to buy crap, they're bombarding you with dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama. All of this seems normal and reasonable to the habitual TV user, but after a year or so of drying out, you will suddenly begin to see it as a strange form of madness.
Watching the news used to be given as a valid reason to have a TV, but there were always newspapers, and now we have the web. Both of those (especially newspapers) provide more depth than television anyway.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
The FCC's mandate to oust NTSC from the airwaves so soon is just a bonehead idea in my opinion. Digital TV is an upper class toy than something beneficial to everyone. Look for example at the prices of the DTVs, they are thousands of dollars, where the analog 25" one I have was only a few hundred and I rather like its picture quality. As for DTV broadcasting, why would cable companies want to try to convert? They are just now starting to roll out cable internet service which is pretty profitable for them. DTV over coax would be difficult at best due to bandwidth problems. Right now only microwave satillite has the capacity to stream 19Mbps per channel to everyone on your block. Cable companies would have to overhaul their whole coax network just to match the bandwidth. TV manufacturers are making quite a profit building relativly cheap TVs that have coax/RCA connections that have much higher profit margines than digital TVs. Even if a lot of people could afford the TVs and service, how many people does the FCC think would buy it? Cable on a good day only comes through to 55% or so of the country, what happens to everyone who can't afford DTV? Oh yeah, broadcasters CAN as an option broadcast NTSC...does that seem like a bullshit plan to anyone else? Simulcasting is expensive, there would be 5 minute commercial spreads just to cover the price of the double broadcasting. I can imagine broadcasters are as aprehensive as the cable companies for the same reason. Digital broadcasting needs entirely new equipment and that equipment costs money. What was the FCC thinking?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I indirectly place most of the blame for this on our government. Long rant, semi-offtopic.
The supply/demand argument works here, I think. Cable broadcasters aren't going to want to support (supply) digital TV (I assume they are referring to HDTV) until a lot of people have HDTV's (demand). As I remember it was a similar situation when CD-Roms came out. Software was pretty limited until computers started shipping standard with a CDROM drive.
On the cosumer (demand) side: The obvious problem is that HDTV's are very expensive, around $3000 minimum. I've seen studies that have shown that very few consumers are willing to shell out more than 200 dollars more than today's analog/NTSC TV's for HDTV quality. Numbers can be distorted of course, but knowing the average American consumer, I'd have to agree.
So where did the government screw up? There are three areas I can think of. One is the hardware in HDTV's, two is the current situation in the communications industry as influenced by the tele-communications act, and third are the timetables from converting all broadcasts in the country to digital.
HDTV Hardware:
The HDTV spec supports 18 different formats (different resolutions, progressive or interlaced, etc) and thus all HDTV's have to be able to run these 18 formats. More formats = higher hardware costs. Now, on the big TV's this cost can get absorbed easily, but what % of the population has big screens? All the people who have small TV's will have to pay just as much for that hardware. That's big money and helps to prevent the prices on small sets to drop below a certain point. In analog sets today, almost all of the cost is in the picture tube. Now, there is a large chuck in just the hardware.
How did this happen? The leading electronics companies couldn't agree on what formats to include, and the FCC simply caved in to corporate big brother, and included them all. Almost as pathetic as the giveaway of the frequency spectrum for digital broadcasting. Gotta love those lobbyists.
Communications industry:
Deregulation has hurt a lot more than it has helped. Service and contend providers are increasingly concetrated in a few companies, to the point where we nearly have an oligopoly. Many areas still have legalized monoplies (the exact opposite of what should be happening in a market controlled partially by the government). So when you have a legalized monopoly, there is no incentive to upgrade the infrastructure when you can make plenty of money with what you have now. I've posted this same argument before in the form of "why is high speed internet access so expensive or unavailable." You can apply the same argument as to why most cable companies aren't exactly moving fast on digital TV.
Timetables to 100% digital broadcasting:
The year for 100% conversion (plus or minus a few years, don't have my reference handy) is 2006. Six years is not enough time. Billions upon billions of dollars of equipment and infastructure have to be replaced. New sets have to be bought. Some people cimply can't afford them. The FCC is trying to push this too quickly. Why they are doing this I don't know. Prices are falling but even in 2006 I think they'll still be more expensive than today's analog equivalents.
In summary the FCC has simply caved into industry pressure and the results aren't good for the consumer. It's really unfortunate.
I'm not surprised that digital TV hasn't appeared yet. First of all, current low-definition TV takes a lot less bandwidth than HDTV, and most cablecos and TV networks would rather have more channels than a few really high quality ones. Unless they are trying to cater only to the very wealthiest consumers, perhaps... who likely don't watch so much television.
There's also some paranoia about changing the standards - I recall hearing two women in the mall talking about how the gov't was going to change the standards to digital TV, forcing everyone to get a brand new expensive TV set etc.. This was last summer sometime. TV is currently a friendly, non-demanding technology and the idea of making it "high-tech" is going to lead to similar FUD amongst the less technologically minded.
Anyways the speech seems to be referring specifically to interactive TV rather than merely digital TV. But haven't most interactive TV experiments failed? The biggest project I know of was Videotron's Videoway service in Quebec, and judging from the last annual report of theirs I saw subscriptions are dropping and the company appears to be phasing it out. No wonder the industry isn't too keen on it.
YOU WILL BE FORCED TO BUY NEW TELEVISIONS!!!
That's the big difference, and it's why your argument is terrible (and sure as hell isn't worth a 4 score.)
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Wired has an excellent article on this subject. It is a little old (Feb 1997) at this point, but as far as I know, still valid. Everyone should read this: The Great HDTV Swindle.
Here is a quick summary:
Conventional NTSC signals are analog. Frames are broadcast more or less as they are, and the timing signal is embedded in the carrier. DTV is Digital Television. By digitizing the signal, you can do things like compress it to save bandwidth, include program information, add additional data services, etc. HDTV is High Definition Television. It roughly doubles the number of vertical scan lines being broadcast, yielded a significantly better picture. It also allows different aspect ratios, so you don't have to clip or letterbox a movie to broadcast it.
Sounds real neat, right?
Not exactly. DTV compression allows HDTV to be broadcast in the roughly the same bandwidth as current TV channels. It also allows compression of NTSC signals. Rather then broadcasting HDTV in a full channel, a broadcaster can compress the NTSC signal, broadcast that using only one sixth of the channel, and lease the remaining bandwidth to wireless communications providers.
Given the limited initial demand for HDTV, what do you think the broadcasters are going to do? Waste all that bandwidth on a signal most are not going to use, or give us what we currently have and lots of extra money leasing their bandwidth? I know which one I would bet on.
So, if you think you are going to be seeing a better TV picture any time soon, think again. Except to spend lots of money to upgrade your equipment, but with zero reward.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.