Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.