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FCC Pushes Digital TV and Digital Restrictions
Mansing writes "The Washingington Post has an article describing the FCC's new push to move digital TV more into the homes of consumers. While this sounds like a good thing, read on. The Congressmen who are "helping" this to happen are none other than Senator Fritz "Disney" Hollings and Representative Billy "Baby Bell" Tauzin. And why do you think they want digital TV rolled out faster? Can you say Pay to View?"
You analogy is not valid. Both the B&W/color and the VHF/UHF enhancements to TV occured because of market pressure not because of gov't involvement. VHF/UHF: Originally there were only 12 channels (2-13) available in any area. Since VHF signals travel so far and tuners were not great, the area was rather large. This meant that large cities had VHF stations and the suburban and rural area around them could not have any because they were in the "overlap area" of 12 stations. As a result, people in these areas picked up 12 channels of 50%+ snow. Enter UHF. UHF was specifically put in place to allow more channels for use in smaller cities. Tuner attachments were sold to allow a 2-13 TV to pick up UHF stations and the inherent demand for TV in these areas forced the issue. B&W/Color: This was NBC's big thing. Remember the NBC proud as a peacock slogan? You know how NBC has the logo with the peacock? That's because NBC was a pioneer in color. They got with manufacturers like RCA... said, "we think this will sell in color if people actually see it." So they started broadcasting some shows in color and when they did they put the logo in the bottom of the screen. They also had TV stores put color TVs on display and did a marketing campaign to explain to viewers that everytime you see the logo that show was available in color and you were missing it because you didn't have a color TV. People saw what they were missing and saw that it was worth to them what the cost was so they bought color TV's. Now an explanation of HDTV. HDTV is perceived by the general public to be superior; however, it's not perceived by the general public to be worth the cost. As a result, the market demand doesn't exist right now and the product should be delayed at this point. However, lobbying and so forth has produced gov't intervention to make TV stations broadcast in HDTV by certain deadlines. As a result, some stations will probably disappear most will actually do the upgrades but not because of true demand. Most consumers will need to go get a new TV and/or other equipment and the end result is that the TV manufacturers who lobbied for it get a guarantee on equipment sales in the near future.