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Feds to Require Digital Receivers In All New TVs?
jonerik writes "According to this article in USA Today, the FCC is expected next week to require all new TV sets to include digital receivers by 2006. TV manufacturers are balking at the requirement, which they say would increase the price of new TVs by about $200. The National Association of Broadcasters counters that their study shows that the price increase would be half that, and would decrease to about $15 by 2006. The government, eager to sell off the TV broadcast spectrum to wireless carriers, is between a rock and a hard place, with sales of HDTVs slower than expected, broadcasters and cable systems not exactly jumping at the bit to take on the cost of reconfiguring for digital broadcasts, and a public that seems pretty satisfied with traditional analog TVs."
If they cease to tranmit an analog signal it will force everyone without a digital reciever or a tv capable of decoding digital signals to upgrade if they want to continue to watch tv. Currently the FCC mandates that broadcast channels be transmitted via analog but if they change that ruling then they certainly can require it.
To sum it up, there's an artificial "bandwidth shortage" combined with a desire by electronics manufacturers to sell more expensive stuff. Get those groups lobbying the FCC and the result seems pretty obvious to me.
FYI, Movie DVDs are 99% of the time dual layer, 9.4 GB discs and they can not be 'duplicated' in the traditional sense, as DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW discs are 4.7 GB single layer, so a movie doesn't fit on a single recordable.
Yes, there is software that will rip the files and split them up so you can burn a movie back to two discs, or reduce the quality and strip out extra information (subtitles, foreign audio, etc) and try to make it fit on one DVD recordable, but if you figure your time to be worth more than $1/hr, you're better off just buying the DVD in the first place.
Luckily most porn discs are small as they don't include a lot of additional information, so they can usually be duplicated... at least that's what I've heard
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
You see there is this part of the government called the Federal Communications Commission. It is their job to make sure that all of those nifty wireless devices; like Radios, Walkie-talkies, Cell Phones, Wi-Fi Internet Access points, Cordless Phones, Television Signals, Very Low Frequency Transmissions, Satellite Signals and just about every other way to communicate wirelessly are able to do their thing without interfering with one another.
No matter what they do, they are simply unable to create new frequencies. There are only so many frequencies available. So, they have to limit and control those frequencies, otherwise the next time you turn on your cell phone, you might end up getting nothing but an old "I Love Lucy" show, or end up having to help a Jetliner land at a landing strip 60 miles from your home.
Without the government regulating and controlling the airwaves, what kind of Electro-Magnetic Interference is tolerable from your computer and other things. Many, if not most, of the communications devices that we take for granted would simply not exist.
Everyday that I can turn on my car radio, make a cell phone call. Heck, even connect to the internet and post a message here on Slashdot, is another day that I should thank the FCC and the people that made the FCC possible.
BS about how "Market Forces" and other blah-blah crud would simply be much better than government regulations regarding communications, would have left us with a wasteland of commmunications devices that simply wouldn't be able to communicate.
I have no doubt that without the FCC, we simply would not have the same level of technology that we have today. Most everything with electronic control devices would have trouble operating properly, if they operated at all. There would be little to no chance that we would have been able to see the Moon Landings, let alone even travel to the Moon.
The world would certainly be a different place without the regulation of the airwaves. I have to admit that I am unable to claim being an expert when it comes to radio signals and wireless communications, but from my limited readings, it is very easy to interfere with the radio signals that are in use in most devices. Just remember that the next time you enter a tunnel while on your cell phone.
-.-
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
TV reception over an antenna does not have to be analogue only. Well, not in the UK at least. Admittedly, the company that was doing it has gone bust, and the licenses have now been sold to the BBC, but if I bought a digital box (for 99 pounds), I could pick up free-to-air digital services through my antenna. Digital through satellite or cable is also available of course.
So if I don't buy into the "everything is disposable" routine and am still using a ten-year old tv in 2006, suddenly I will be treated only to static and a few pirate tv channels being broadcast from teenagers' backyards(until the FCC shuts them down of course).
No. You will buy a $99 (maybe even less) box that sits on top of your TV and decodes the digital signal so that your old TV can display it. Every other form of digital TV does this currently, and in fact I have yet to see TVs with integrated digital cable or satellite decoders. In the UK the government is considering giving them away to the stragglers if digital terrestrial TV hasn't taken off enough by the time the analogue signals are shut off. Perhaps the FCC might do the same if they're desperate for the frequencies. You get more channels and better picture and sound.
In any case, 2006 is only the date when all new TVs must have built-in decoders - it says nothing about the actual shutoff date for analogue transmissions. In the UK that's set for 2010, although that could change by a year or two in either direction depending on adoption rates and how the government plays it, and the UK is a little bit ahead of the US in the adoption curve.
Really, there is an easy way out.
If they were to change the digital standard to allow for additional codecs now, it might take years to hash out the patent licensing. Also, the older the codec, the sooner the patents expire. MPEG2 has been around for a while now. And if they're really taking advantage of new codecs, they'll need to not only add support for them, but also add support for different divisions of the spectrum so as to use the saved bandwidth for something else.
Not to mention those few digital tuners already out there and those chipsets already in development...
While it would be nice to take advantage of all the latest technology, at some point you have to say it's good enough and go with it.
Here in the UK we have both satellite digital and "terrestrial broadcast" digital, the latter being digital that you can receive through an ordinary antenna with a set-top box on your plain old analogue TV. The terrestrial broadcast network, ITV Digital, tried to squeeze 48 channels into the available bandwidth, and the result was famously shite quality.
It wasn't even the tolerable sort of poor quality that you get on analogue: fuzz, crackle, etc. Instead, it's blocks of non-motion on your screen, or even the entire screen freezing up, while the video buffer struggles to refill.
Just what you want when you're watching a crucial sports match.
No thank you.
ITV Digital have recently gone bust, and a consortium including the BBC and Murdoch have stepped in to take it over. They are planning to reduce the channel count to 24, and to introduce other improvements in the transmitter network, so maybe the quality will improve. But they are no longer asking people to pay a monthly subscription: it will be for free-to-air channels only. Seems sensible to me: why pay for what we can already get it for free?
I also expected that my new digital cordless phone's quality would be better than my old analogue cordless. No, just like the digital TV, the intereference is no longer crackle-and-fuzz, it's random cut-outs when I get more than 20 yards from the base station. A friend of mine has had similar problems with his new digital cordless in the US.
So I don't expect that TV reception quality will improve simply because "It's digital!" You can implement bad quality transmission in any medium.
The $200 extra per TV seems a bit steep.
Here in the UK you can get a set-top terrestrial digital receiver for £99 with no subscription charges. That gives us a rough idea of production costs, but compare similarly-featured analogue TVs to digital TVs and there's a couple of hundred quid difference.
It seems that the cost of "going digital" is being kept artificially high by TV manufacturers.
On a similar subject, the UK government wants to switch off analogue broadcasts by 2010. Many people think this is unrealistic because digital take-up has been slow and TV manufacturers aren't doing anything to help, especially with regard to low-income homes. You can get a decent-sized analogue TV for less than £200 but you're looking at almost three times as much to get a basic digital set.
They're not mandating that every TV has an HDTV tuner on board. They are mandating that every TV has a digital tuner. This would mean that you don't need to use that external box for your digital cable any more.
Had the FCC not required manufacturers to put the tuners that we use today, we'd still be using those old cable boxes. I'm sure that most of you have seen one of those clunky things before.
I know that it's the "in thing" to get all up in arms when "The Man" does anything at all, but show some common sense.
Your inappropriate use of profanity aside, you're wrong.
Consumer Electronics dudes whine "18 formats make every thing cost more, you are fucking us!"
The much-talked-about 18 ATSC formats are as follows:
1080 x 1920, 30i (meaning 1920 by 1080 pixels, 30 fps interlaced)
1080 x 1920, 30p
1080 x 1920, 24p
1280 x 720, 60p
1280 x 720, 30p
1280 x 720, 24p
480 x 704, 60p
480 x 704, 30i
480 x 704, 30p
480 x 704, 24p
480 x 704, 60p, anamorphic
480 x 704, 30i, anamorphic
480 x 704, 30p, anamorphic
480 x 704, 24p, anamorphic
480 x 640, 60p
480 x 640, 30i
480 x 640, 30p
480 x 640, 24p
So when people say "18 formats," they really mean a combinatorial of four resolutions, three or four frame rates, and one set of anamorphic modes. It's not that complicated.
Consider that fancy graphics card and multi-sync monitor on your desk. It can display 1280 x 1024 at 60 Hz, or at 72 Hz, or at 75 Hz, or at 85 Hz. Did it cost you a fortune? Not relatively, no. Same with HDTV. The formats do not any significant cost to the sets. Particularly considering most consumer sets out there only have one sync rate-- 60 Hz-- and one resolution-- 1080 x 1920. They convert all other formats internally to that display format.
FCC says "OK, it's your call on standards, 18 formats is fine, infact there are NO STANDARDS AT ALL, 'cause we are letting the 'market decide', but you start broadcasting HDTV now or we take back the FREE bandwidth."
There are several very important standards for digital TV broadcasting. Your assertion that there are "no standards at all" is just wrong. In particular, two standards define how digital TV works.
ATSC A/52 defines the Dolby AC-3 audio compression and encoding scheme. This is also known as "Dolby Digital." ATSC A/53 defines stuff like scanning formats, encoder functions, and the 8VSB transmission system.
In addition, there are lots of SMPTE standards that define various interfaces and formats related to DTV. For example, SMPTE 274M defines the 1920 x 1080 scanning format. SMPTE 292M defines the HD bit serial transport over coaxial and fiber optic cables. The list goes on.
DTV is highly standardized, and wickedly interoperable. You can take a camera from Sony and plug it into a deck from Panasonic and know, without a doubt, that one will record the output of the other without trouble. Likewise, you can buy a TV today with a built-in receiver and know that it'll be able to receive the 8VSB terrestrial signal from any DTV broadcaster in the FCC's jurisdiction.
So you're wrong about that, too.
You're overstating things. It's not accurate to say that "digital sucks." It's pretty accurate to say that low-bit-rate, poorly compressed digital cable TV sucks.
For about a week, I subscribed to AT&T Broadband digital cable. I like rugby and Aussie rules football, and AT&T carried Fox Sports International as part of their basic channel line-up. So I signed up.
AT&T compresses Fox Sports International so much that you can see artifacts in the on-screen graphics. You have to turn that knob all the way to the left before you're compressing enough to see artifacts in non-moving parts of the picture.
So I fired AT&T and bought a DirecTV receiver. I pay $12 a month more, but I get the same channel, also delivered digitally, with much higher PQ. No more artifacts in the non-moving parts of the picture, and much less compression artifacting when the camera swish-pans or something.
Then there's HDTV. HDTV is digital, and it's compressed. It's compressed a lot, too, from over 1 Gbps down to 19.4 Mbps. That's about 50:1. But the picture is almost always crystal-clear, significantly better than DVD. It takes a lot to cause visible artifacting. One time I was watching a college football game in HD, and they cut to a shot of the kids in the stands waving their pom-poms. There was so much movement in the scene that, for a second, it broke up into total digital artifacting. But I only saw it because I was looking for it, and it was only on-screen for about ten frames.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Digital is a powerful force that can be used either for good or for evil. Broadcasting digital HDTV is good. Broadcasting pay-per-view programs at a megabit per second is evil.
Besides, dude, what the hell are you thinking trying to watch NTSC on a 40" TV?? The human eye can resolve about a point about six arc-seconds across. Given that NTSC only broadcasts 480 visible lines, you'd have to be, like, fifteen or twenty feet away from your 40" TV before you started seeing a decent picture. Any closer, and you're just looking at pixels.