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."

Comments

This has plenty to do with the Gub'nit

[cnelzie]

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.

-.-

Digital quality?

[jdfox]

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.