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FCC And More HDTV Rules
Logic Bomb writes: "The New York Times has a story (free reg req) on the latest twist in the battles over High Definition Television. The FCC has concluded that cable companies can not be compelled to carry both the digital and analog versions of a broadcast station's signal. This will definitely make the transition period to full digital even more turbulent, since in individual markets people who have or have not updated their viewing equipment may end up watching different channels." deebaine points also to this CNN story on same; all this HDTV is going to get worse before it gets better.
- Networks are moving from paying affiliates to carry programs, to having the affiliates pay them.
- Eventually, networks will avoid local broadcast affiliates completely and go direct to the consumer over cable, DSL, and satellite
- 70% of U.S. residents already get their TV from wire-based services, 10% from DBS satellites
So while DTV and HDTV will probably find use over digital wirelines services, the quagmire known as broadcast TV will only adopt any DTV services in the 10 largest metropolitan areas. Station owners are going to have to start paying TV networks for programming, and there is no coherent business plan for local broadcasters to recover the costs of switching to DTV (no viewers either due to expensive sets). I think that it is nuts that the FCC determines what modulation modes should be used. Technological change happens rapidly now. Broadcast stations wasting precious bandwidth with analog transmissions should not be catered to. Spectrum use (rental) should be auctioned, and the winner can do whatever he or she wants with it. Look at the unregulated 900 MHz spectrum, used by everything from baby monitors to Ricochet micro-cellular data networks. We could have G3 wireless technology now instead of channel 5.Seriously, how many really good TV shows are there on TV now? CNN- and MSNBC-type info can all be gotten online. This leaves local news (read the paper) and fiction. OK, so you want to spend how much money to be able to watch Buffy, X-Files, Angel, StarCrap, et al.? I'm leaving asides sports games, but for me this is a total non-issue. Hmmm, movie playback... Unless you spend $100K on your home theater, it's better on the big screen (and if your memory is good it's pretty pointless to watch
something more than once).
From the advertising industry pov, there are only so many Lexus commercials that they can usefully air. They need to sell things like second mortages, Tide, PineSol, and Doritos on there too. They need to sell monster truck show ads. Point being, the market does not involve only those people who make enough money to spend $300 on a tv set.
A tv set is something that should be, like a radio, low threshhold of entry into the market. You should be able to get a shitty tv at the tag sale and be able to watch broadcast shows on it.
If everything is mediated through expensive digital cables, there will be an even greater media divide than there is right now. Broadcast tv does some useful stuff, like telling people where to vote, what the weather will be, and where the traffic jams are. Many of these people don't have the time or the resources to look anywhere else. Usually, even the poorest family has access to a tv set, not the internet or even the newspaper.
Advertisers, wanting to reach all markets, value the broadcast TV market and hopefully should resist any attempt to exclude poorer markets from watching television.
Goat sex free since 2001
The latest news just shows us that the cable companies already have enough of a foothold to stall indefinitely, and they have obvious motives to do so, since the ultimate goal would be to make it possible to get better-than-current-cable picture quality without purchasing anything, at least in urban areas. At least that's the way I understand the goal, correct me if I'm wrong.
it's better on the big screen
That's fine, except most movies in the studio libraries will never be shown on the big screen again.
Movies that make 95% of what is available in theaters today look like junk.
Plus, speaking of MPEG artifacts, has anyone else notices how ugly DVD's get when you have a solid dark color. For instance, in dark scenes the whole background becomes a bunch of black squares.
Turn your brightness down, and/or get a better DVD player. This is a common symptom of poor calibration.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Who wants a VCR that has one tape (Hard Drive) installed that is not removable. Quick show of hands, Who has a VCR with less than 3 tapes? I personaly have over 300 in my private library. I rewatch the good stuff when "trash and infomercials" are on TV. People will want to pull out recordable media to throw into the vault for later. Anything less is an unaceptable limitation. A digital VCR is OK for an addition to a removable media VCR for time shifting the game or soaps, but it does not replace a VCR.
The truth shall set you free!
With my next computer, which hopefully isn't too far away, I am probably going to buy a Samsung SyncMaster 1200 22" monitor for around $750. Big resolution, big refresh rates etc. When HDTV comes to me I will already have something capable of its resolution and with a decoder card I'll be set. That is the way I see alot of people going, especially with DVD's being common on computers finally and what not, people are really starting to get used to using their comptuer for everything. And why not? its made to be versitile so the more things you use it for the more efficient you are.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
The people that care enough to upgrade are the ones that'll get screwed in the end because an even newer technology will come along!
I am !amused.
True that TV still sucks, but it'll certainly be nice for HD-DVDs to start coming out so at least we'll have nicer-looking movies! After all, movies are where the higher-resolution is more needed anyway..
Quick question, how many of these shows can be recieved off the airwaves (not dish or cable)? Cable and broadcast frequencies have nothing in common.
The truth shall set you free!
Just don't get HDTV, unless the laws have changed such that fair use comes back and we won't have to be subject to the controls on copying and playback of the digital signal. If they are dependent on a patented signal which must be licensed from a consortium of content providers, then all the builders of end user equipment will be beholden to them, and it will be DeCSS lawsuits all over again.
Only if enough people who realize this decide *not* to buy HDTV is there hope. Yes, it will be painful if you can't get an analog signal, but just do without. Otherwise, we will be gladly cedeing any freedoms we might have to the content providers.
-Rob
The networks would simply claim restraint of trade and lawsuit-bomb anyone who offered such a service. The suits probably wouldn't stand up in court over the long haul, but the legal costs would bankrupt the defendant and force him to sell his company...probably to the very networks suing him. Oh, sure, they'd call it a "partnership," but what it would mean in the final analysis is that the commercial-zapping technology would be buried, and buried deep.
Additionally, any service for editing out commercials would be DOA to begin with, as such a device would be difficult to sell without television advertising, and there's no way the networks are going to sell ad time for a service that attacks their revenue stream.
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
Exactly the post I was going to make. What the hell is so *great* about HDTV anyway! Yay, I get to watch more mindless drivel with - *higher definition*. Joy! I watch TV basically for Fox Sundays and Tuesdays, and the Lehrer show on PBS, and if I can catch a Nova once in a while, but I never know when they're on. Everything else is pretty much a vast wasteland of utter rotting crap. The government should support a bill that makes normal TVs, as they are, MORE expensive so people watch them less.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
We're already there. Over the christmas holiday, AT&T Broadband in Oak Park (and probably much of the rest of the Chicago metro area) disabled anything on analog that you had to have a set-top box to get. In order to get those channels, you now have to get digital cable, period. Lucky me, I've always hated set-top boxes, so I didn't have anything that required one to begin with. But many other people complained strongly enough about the minimal warning (yes, there was a warning buried in the previous months bill, amongst all the junk they always include) that it made the local paper.
When it comes time to choose between digital cable or no cable, I'm going with a dish, and AT&T can thank themselves for losing another customer.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I wish TV would finally die the horrible death it deserves!
What is there on TV? 125 channels, and nothing good's on. And when there finally is something on, it's 3 different show, all on at the same time!
In the last 5 decades TV has barely changed. Sure, there's the 'interactive' stuff, which really add no value to the medium. Sure, you can have PayPerView, but I'm the last guy on earth that's gonna pay $20 for a 'special' I'll be able to rent for $3 in a month! The only real major innovation was color, and perhaps CC. Stuff like stereo and SAP are good, but barely used
What's more is the stupid idea of rating shows with a stupid logo in the corner. Sure the V-Chip (whatever happened to that anyways?) could solve this, but it's pointless now: a large percentage of TVs don't have it, so they *have* to put the rating anyways, and since TVs last for a while, we'll be stuck with that for another 10 years! arrrggg!
My vision of 'TV' is like that Quest commercial that ran a while back, where the girl said "We have every movie ever made in every language available, anytime" (or something like that), just like web surfing.
Imagine, being able to watch episode number X of show Y anytime you wish, and have it up within seconds. Just like web surfing.
*THAT* would be real TV
AC comments get piped to
That makes me wonder why there isn't a market for "old movies" in theaters.
They're saying that there are too many theaters for the amount of movies being released (and public willing to go see them) - so why wouldn't it be a great idea to retrieve copies of some older classics and replay them at some theaters. You could go back 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 20 years, 50 years, and play some awesome movies that people still want to see on the big screen. Why not digitize them (so the originals aren't destroyed in the copying process), and project them digitally?
I'm sure there are a lot of retired people with no kids to take care of that would LOVE to revisit these movies again.
The movie industry's zeal to saturate the market with new movies is preventing a lot of good things from happening.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Well, yeah it's a minor point, but sometimes the complete feeling of a scene can be changed when the scene has to be cropped.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Color gradients (from color A to B) have artifacts show up quite a bit on DVDs. Would your solution clear that up as well? While some DVDs do have compression artifacts, more often than not bad image quality is a result of having the TV's sharpness, brightness, or contrast set way too high. I can't think of a DVD that was authored in the past 20 or so months that I've seen (at least a couple of hundred) that had any noticable compression problems on any of my DVD players or televisions. However, on an uncalibrated television, even the best DVD can look like a low-bitrate Smacker file. Nothing improves video quality as much as a good calibration - new televisions, connections, and video sources not withstanding. As for color gradients specifically -- more likely than not, your TV's sharpness is set too high, which results in visible banding and ringing on DVDs. Also, if you have a first-generation DVD player with an 8-bit color DAC, consider buying a new DVD player. All players manufactured since early 1998 have used improved 10-bit DACs.
What concerns me even more than this is as I understand it, the DTV that the FCC has mandated that we migrate to will be, by law, encoded in pay-to-license formats. (Dolby Digital and MPEG.) Currently, NTSC television is (to my knowledge) license free. This means all sorts of nasty private corporate interests between people who want to make stuff and the Evil Companies. ("No, it won't run Ogg or on Linux.")
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Actually "digital" television was never intended to look better than analog. In fact it was designed from the beginning to look like shit compared to current analog(NTSC)broadcasts. It instead was designed so that digital HDTV bradcasters to be could invest in new DHDTV transmitters but still be able to use thier NTSC equipment and media. However when sending the digital eqivalant of NTSC resolution over an HDTV size channel you are only using about a third of the bandwidth or less. What your cable company is doing is allowing you to see three times more of the usual mundane cable tv bullshit for your $60. We bought several $10,000 to $15,000 wide screen PDP's for some exhibits here where i work(not our idea though). These exhibits use dvd players. Well whenthe PDP's got done scaling and croping the images, and even when they didn't the images still looked like crap! But if we were to feed them an HDTV signal using HDTV recorded media I'm sure it would look just fine.
Anyone can see a difference. You probably just didn't look at correctly or you're confusing DTV with HDTV. HDTV can have resolutions up to 1920x1080 versus NTSC's 720x480. That's Nearly 6 times more pixels. After watching a 1080i broadcast and comparing to an NTSC broadcast, you'd cry. It's not like CD player A sounding better than CD player B. It's like comparing mono LPs on a 50 year old turntable to DVD-Audio 5.1. The difference is HUGE!
Oh come on its really *that* informative?
:)
Heh, I'm inclined to agree, +5 for that was a little over the top.
I should've put in a plug for Video Essentials, a very useful disc for TV/monitor calibration. Once a TV/DVD player combination is set up according to VE's instructions, a lot of commonly-reported "artifacts" simply won't be visible any longer. Sharpness and brightness are the two most frequently-abused controls on just about any TV set, and Video Essentials can really help you bring them in line.
Nothing can salvage a badly-mastered disc. Fortunately, though, the real stinkers are a lot less common than you'd expect. Most R1 DVDs from the major studios look darned good these days.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
what bothers me about cable is the fact that the signals suck. They don't want you splitting the cable unless you pay for it. The signal is weak, and the more you split, the worse it gets. My TV's get horrible reception (both at home and here at school). Do I really need to pay extra money (for Digital Cable or HDTV) when it is shit anyway and the signal is weak?
"and if your memory is good it's pretty pointless to watch something more than once"
/. crowd absolutely adore the Star Wars series.
I don't know about you, but I don't re-watch good films because I've forgotten what happened in them, or how good they were. I watch good films for the overall experience, for the same reason that we listen to good music, or eat good food more than once.
I can never get enough of Stanely Kubrick films, and I know a good portion of the
Personally, I am going to look at HDTV once it's been around for a while and the benefits have become a little more sought-after. But IMO the only quality it has going for it, in reality, is the additional number of channels available.
There is just simply no way that millions of people are going to turn in their old sets in favour of 'better quality', when the reality is that the majority of people are content in watching poor reception on tiny TV's.
I disagree that movies are nessicarily better on the big screen. It's nice to see one there once in a while, but isn't it better to see a movie where YOU control the number of screaming kids, availiability of refreshment, color and sound balance? Even a cheap system can benefit tremendously from a cheap sound meter and copy of Video Essentials, which will tell you all you need to know about how to adjust video and sound parameters on your system - anyone can do it! And after fiddling with all the settings on your TV and seeing how screwed up your color balance is at best, you'll also see why you really want to buy a much nicer HDTV set...
My system is a simple (and cheap) 5.1 surround, but even that is good enough that I really don't go out to movies much anymore. As another poster pointed out you also are not going to be able to see 95% (really more like 99%) of the movies availiable on DVD in the theaters ever, so why not make home as theatre like as possible?
I agree with you about TV, I long ago discontinued my cable service and don't watch broadcast TV much at all. Mostly my TV is a pure monitor for games and movies.
The last statement I thought was on target as well - I think before too long someone is going to start offering some sort of cable cable over tcp/ip (with agreements to broadcast the shows they air). Then perhaps I could really get the shows I want to watch, and not have to pay for the crap. As soon as studios stop fearing the piracy bogeyman, they will actually be able to make some real money.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, they know people will still use their VCR & TV with these. Getting people to give up this to spend lots of money upgrading to a digital *cough*cable subscription*cough* TV that can't work with a $100 VCR is going to be rough. People will want the stuff out of the cable box to be compatible with what they already have. True they will market it as not needing a cable box as it is "Digital Cable Ready" but time shifters will soon find it won't work with the VCR. Most people will put on the brakes on a "DIGITAL CABLE READY VCR" due to the high cost.
The truth shall set you free!
not when you have 10 illegal TV's connceted in your house...
Color gradients (from color A to B) have artifacts show up quite a bit on DVDs. Would your solution clear that up as well?
The more I read about all the bulshit going on with and around HDTV, the more I think I'm just going to not upgrade to it at all. When my regular set is no longer useful, I'll make it into a great big 35" aquarium.
Seriously, how many really good TV shows are there on TV now? CNN- and MSNBC-type info can all be gotten online. This leaves local news (read the paper) and fiction. OK, so you want to spend how much money to be able to watch Buffy, X-Files, Angel, StarCrap, et al.? I'm leaving asides sports games, but for me this is a total non-issue. Hmmm, movie playback... Unless you spend $100K on your home theater, it's better on the big screen (and if your memory is good it's pretty pointless to watch something more than once).
I suspect many people will hit this point of diminishing returns where the marginal utility realized from upgrading to HDTV is just too small (hastened by the prevalence of PCs and net appliances providing a roughly equivalent feed of information). If the broadcasters and manufacturers wish to avoid this fate they'd better begin acting intelligently real quick (interoperable standards, ease of use (including taping and reproduction) similar to prextant standards, etc.). If they don't I suspect that my as-yet unconceived child(ren) will ask me what this "TV" thing was that I and their grandparents blabber on about...
This is not to say that there won't be some form of intellectual cotton-candy available as an opiate to the anesthetised masses. It might just be tcp/ip based instead of TV-feeding-trough based.
--
Fuck Censorship.
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Some clients left impressed, while others left scratching their heads, but I think the most interesting thing about HDTV, is that while we had some large screen $10,000 HDTV's to display some of the video, we were also using standard Dell monitors to display HDTV signals as well. The picture quality is great, though limited to the 21 inches or so of the monitors we had on hand. Now if I just had a 40 inch "monitor" I'd be all set for the HDTV "revolution" if and when it ever arrives.
High definition Penguins. The Linux Pimp
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A best, one cycle of an analog video frequency can provide information to two pixels. (NOTE: This is AT BEST -- it can easily be argued that one cycle only provides full video information to one pixel!)
A conventional NTSC image has 525 lines scanned at 29.97 Hz with a horizontal resolution of 427 pixels. This gives 3.35 MHz (assuming 2 pixels per video cycle) as a minimum bandwidth to carry the video information without compression.
If one decides to move to an HDTV image that is 1050 lines by 600 pixels (keeping the same frame rate), then this means a bandwidth of 18 MHz. Clearly we have a problem here -- as the current terrestrial channel allocations are limited to 6 MHz!
(As an aside, the word "terrestrial" as used by TV people means conventional wireless TV transmission. This is to differentiate it from satellite or cable.)
The options for terrestrial broadcast (assuming a 20 MHz bandwidth) are roughly as follows:
1. Change the channel allocation system from 6 MHz to 20 MHz.
2. Compress the signal to fit inside the 6 MHz existing bandwidths
3. Allocate multiple channels (2 with compression or three without) for the HDTV signal
Options 1 and 2 are virtually incompatible with current NTSC service. About the only possibility for maintaining compatibility is simultaneous broadcast of NTSC information over certain channels and HDTV information over other channels.
Option 3 does allow compatibility -- as the first 6 MHz of the signal could keep to the standard NTSC broadcasting and the remaining be additional augmentation signal for HDTV. Typically, in this type of augmentation system, an existing VHF channel would be tied to one (or two) UHF channels. The VHF channel would carry information similar to the current NTSC signal and the UHF channel (or channels would carry augmented high resolution information).
Theoretically, with a digital signal there is enough redundancy built in that even if the signal is very weak you will still be able to get a very crisp, distortion-free image.
If your cable signal sucks, you should call your cable operator and complain. If they don't comply, call your states public utility commission.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Yes folks, I am an early adopter.
(Some might also say I paid $400 to beta test for Hauppauge, but that's another story)
HDTV is beautiful. Those who haven't seen it are the ones who think it's not worth the bother. I don't have a great setup either, basically just a 2nd hand Panasonic 30" 16:9 monitor I purchased over Ebay (with lots burn-in, sigh) my PC and the Hauppauge WinTV-HD. After seeing this I'd say it's definately worth it just to display on a larger PC monitor, say 19" or larger. I can only imagine what it will look like on a progressive RPTV.
I watched my first ever football game last week on CBS and was amazed at how sharp and clear things were. CBS clearly leads the way with original Hi-definition programing. You just have to see Football or a sitcom like Raymond in Hi-def to see what you've been missing.
The only thing is I live in an apartment. I use a plain old Rat-Shack UHF Double-Bowtie for reception. I can receive the 3 networks and Fox, that's it. I can't put up an antenna of any type. My cable company won't carry any HDTV, not even the local channels so the other 4 aren't available to me, not to mention the premium HBO-HD and SHO-HD channels.
Most folks are in the same situation as I am. Over 60% of the US population gets their TV reception exclusively from cable tv. If cable doesn't carry HDTV it will fail. Simple as that.
Here's a simple test.
Do you see a big difference in quality between DVD and regular TV broadcast movies? Because HDTV is about twice as good as DVD (or more).
If you really can't see a difference, than you probably were not watching a properly adjusted HDTV, or it was not receiving a high quality HDTV signal.
"And like that
Actually, one has to say that analog satellite or cable TV has quite some advantages. First, if you put a hand in front of your sat antenna, it doesn't really disturb an analog transmission too much while digital transmissions esily get artefacted or the picture simply freezes. And then, digital TV is in my eyes a waste of bandwidth und is also harder to transmit and creating more interference and signal disturbance because of the high frequencies and the square nature of the signal (think Fourier here...).
And I also think that the standard PAL/NTSC TV is in its visual quality definitely good enough for the human eye - and free of artefacts as well. Next thing is, when HDTV comes, analog will die soon. And not everybody is ready or willing to pay all the money for a complete new set of digital TV equipment.
So I think we should --- while of course preferring digital storage methods --- stick with analog transmission.
Well alot of people won't bother getting it, so the market pentration will be poor, especially if it is expensive.
For myself, if it comes to that, I won't get one. I do not have cable now, because for the cost. For the things I would watch, it is cheaper to go to the movies or a club once or twice a month.
If I really had a hankering I'll drop a tv tuner card into my system. That has to be cheaper.
If you add into it the utter and complete hassle of digital locking on HDTV with your HDTV VCR, then people will not but into it to begin with. People don't like getting scammed. or thoughts of the thought police in their bedroom
This will mean that alot of people will not have tv, and will be forced to do things like listen to the radio, or read a book. The TV media market cannot afford this, actually. They want market penetration.
I can recall an article some place talking about the market saturation levels of Computers vs other products, and how long it took to get there. Computers are reaching saturation after about 20 years, but are roughly 60% ofthe market. this compares to normal TV of 85% in a similar period of time. The market penetration seems to be much slower than computers, and due to cost it might take much longer to break 50%. Ity might not reach 50% after 20 years. People are used to the technology shuffle with computers, and won't by into it with HDTV.
Part of it is that if it gets too complex, the reaction will be, why should I do this? I have a computer that does that already.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I guess I'll have to connect my NES to it (yes, the old-school, 8-bit NES).
NES games look just as good or better on a VGA monitor. Here are some Free (as in speech) NES-compatible ROMs to play on a Free (as in speech) NES emulator.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I believe the Japaneese analog compression method is called MUSE. It was proposed to the US for a possible HDTV system back in the '80's I believe.
The FCC rules call for the new digital TV system to fit inside of the exsisting 6Mhz bandwidth. That means HDTV or SDTV must fit. With MPEG2 you can either place 4 Standard Definition or 1 HDTV program(s) in that space.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
Actually he said ANALOG like it wasn't some new technology, and if this old crap costs $60 a month then what is the newfangled stuff gonna cost (surely they will want a premium for it to cover their conversion costs)?
I watch very little TV anyway. I'm with the guy who will make his into an aquarium. Mine's just a 19" bought in 1985, watched about as often as that car was driven by the little old lady from Pasadena, and I'll still be able to use it as a monitor for my old Radio Shack Color Computer II when I get the time to port Linux to it.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Regular or HDTV? Neither.
I am actually glad that pushing HDTV runs into so much obstacles. I have really no use for HDTV because I just don't see any fucking difference! No, really, and I believe there are people who do, but is it really that relevant? To me, this is like those freaks that shun CD players because the sound is "so unnatural", and prefere 100 times more expensive turntable players, with egzotic mechanisms, materials and pickups. Maybe they can hear some difference, but not me. Heck, I am even thinking of selling my Adcom GCA 510, because it's just too good for my ears, I don't hear any difference between this and some cheap Pioneer receiver.
If HDTV becomes a mandated product (because of FCC's decision) and more of them hit the market, in no time will current VCR and DVD players become obsolete. Oh sure, there is backwards compatibility... till when? The same which happens with home surround systems: my Yamaha DSP E1000 does only Dolby Surround 2.0, so it's obsolete, I should rather buy a AX1 which supports 5.1 and DTS. And what next? Some fucker will invent Dolby Shorpround 10.5, for a "really really realistic experience". Fuck that.
So, HDTV anyone? And why?
Sigged!
Cable companies are already switching to digital systems with digital set-top boxes. This will free up bandwidth insted of using a 6Mhz chunk for an analog channel they can broadcast 36 Mbps. Several HDTV channels can be sent down with that more if you use MPEG4 now most are MPEG2.
Travis