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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."
They'd like this. Digital is part of DRM, and DRM means no more videotaping a 10 year old movie on TV, so if you want to see it, it's another buck in Jack Valenti's pocket.
Are they going to put people in jail for making TV's without digital recievers?
What about black and white TV's? What's the point of putting one in there?
How about the TV Watch, is it going to have this huge digital reciever attached to it?
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).
What are the TV manufacturers complaining about, suddenly they can force everyone who has been holding out to buy a new tv. BIG PROFITS.
lysergically yours
is to sell "monitors" that dont come with *any* tuners. It would actually be nice because then you plug in any device (VCR, Satellite, cable box, etc) and use the tuner provided in that. There is no need to have a tuner in TVs nowadays...
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
And I assume you enjoy making copies of those "digital" shows. Do you honestly believe that with the "fairness" that congress has had lately to fair use rights that if digital is mandated and required that you'll have any right to copy "buffy" or even "bugs" anymore?
I agree that digital is great. DVD's are great but at what cost? Can you make a backup? no. Can you purchase one from London? no.
Why do you think that Digital TV, once required will be any better.
Personally the quality isn't worth losing my rights over
Industry always balks at government mandates, the later conforms to the regulation. For example, look at the requirement that all TVs have closed caption capability. First the industry complained that it would increase costs dramatically. Once the manufacturers stopped complaining, they integrated everything needed to meet the requirement onto a single chip that costs are less than $1 per set. Now the same will be done with digital receivers.
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
...The FCC Should look more closely at the series of foul-ups that have hit the UK's Digital Terestrial Television Service in recent months - with the collapse of ITV Digital, and the subsequent relicencing of the system to the BBC, view confidence in the system has slumped - and there were only 1.2 Million viewers of DTT at it's peak anyway!
Serious thought needs to be put into the transmission systems employed, signal quality, and most importantly, programme content - poor content will doom any attempts at Forced DTT takeup to complete failure - pushing more and more people into Cable or Satelite based systems... Sure, the US and UK markets are very different, but should the FCC not at least try and learn from other countries' mistakes?
Disclaimer: I meant what I thought, not what I wrote! What? You can't read my Mind? Oh dear!
I hope they extend this requirement to include broadcast-content-quality, well ok I really wouldn't want the feds regulating what I watch. However, my 26" analog screen is fine for THE show I like to watch. Crocodile hunter is not worth buying an HDTV over though.
I think that the reason people are so 'blah' over this technology relates directly to the quality of content. When a show such as friends is the 'best' entertainment available, things are bad.
Hey, I like the idea of digital TV. I bought a close-captioning television before they were required, too. But mandating it? When airbags aren't required in cars??
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I thought that the radio frequencies available to different people (TV, Radio, Mobile phones, etc) was controlled by the government. Analog TV uses a huge amount of the available r/f bandwidth, and this is bandwidth that can be split up, controlled and resold by the government. As such, I think it's a government decision. They want some of that bandwidth back by 2006, and the only way they're going to get it (and make sure that people can watch TV) is by forcing Sony et/al to start going digital now.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
Who cares ... TV is such crap these days, if it weren't for my wife I would cancel our digital cable and put up an antenna.
If consumers want ditital TV, they'll get it. If they're not adopting it as quickly as the broadcasters and the government would like, the problem is that the price is too high to justify the increase of quality. Its all supply and demand. Once upon a time, not everyone and their 3 yr old kid were talking on cell phones. Now they are. People adapted to that market because the industry found a way to make it happen. If that meant selling the phones for a penny and making up for it on the service, so be it. It was far more effective than forcing a $300 expense up front, which practically nobody was willing to go for.
So if the industry wants Ditital TV in every home in the near future, they're going to have to sell that service so that purchasing analog sets or even keeping the current analog sets doesnt' make sense anymore. This means that new digital TV sets must be LESS expensive than the analog counterparts, not more. If this means the broadcasters will have to partially rebate the costs of the TV sets, so be it. They're the ones who want this so badly, not the manufacturers, not the retaillers, and not the consumers.
If the broadcasters REALLY want this to happen, they just need to announce that they're going to stop transmitted analog signals as of a certain date. The consumers will switch if they really want the service. And if they don't, well, them the breaks. Of course, there will always be straggler broadcasters that will pull the entire market of analog receivers, so this will be a tough trick to pull off without losing tons of market share.
But that's not the government's problem. The government does not need to get involved to mandate a change in industry standards in this way. You can't force the free marketplace. It tends to go where it wants to go. And when it wants digital broadcasting on a large scale, it will have it, and the analog will slowly die away until the point where pulling the plug on it won't make a signficant difference.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I was shopping for a 1080i/480p display recently. I looked at a Sony HDTV set with a tuner built in. Very soon they are putting out a basically equivalent model without the tuner, and it will sell for $500-$700 less. For other brands, HDTV-compatible sets without tuners sets go for $500-$1000 less than the equivalent sets with tuners. I don't know where they get the $200 figure.
The plasma sets are monitors only. If you wnat to tune television -- SDTV or HDTV -- you buy a tuner. Many tube and projection sets come with SDTV tuners but require a separate tuner for HDTV if you want it. The tuner would plug into the TV through the component video inputs -- i.e. a so-called "analog hole".
The government should stay out of decisions that people must spend extra money to have what they neither want nor need.
The difference is that closed caption is actually for the good of mankind. Digital receivers don't add enough value and they give Fritz too many chances to regulate what I can watch in my own home.
Coding Blog
Americans are cheap bastards. I know I'm one of them.
:)
We'd all buy a digital TV if it were cheaper. In my apartment with my roommates we had one tv, it was like 13 inches. We don't care about "digital cable" or HDTV because we can't even afford *basic* cable. Plus lots of people are already invested in their giganto projection TVs already.
Rob
P.S. I would be glad to take your gignato projection tv so that you can buy a digital.
It's all about bandwidth. The FCC regulates the frequencies people are allowed to transmit on. Analog TV frequencies are taking up a huge block of bandwidth that can be used for other emerging wireless technologies. In order to free up that bandwidth, broadcast television stations need to move over to digital broadcasts which use a smaller chunk of frequencies to transmit. Until the broadcasters are switched over they are using both the analog and digital frequencies, which is a waste of this very limited resource.
Once consumers switch over to digital TVs, or at least digital tuners, the FCC can take back the analog TV frequencies. Right now the plan is for this to happen in 2006. TV manufacturers are dragging their feet because they can charge a nice premium on digital TVs right now, and moving them into the mainstream means lower profit margins and lower overall profits for them.
Once digital TVs become mainstream the price to make them will be very small. Consumers get better quality pictures and sound for this small additional cost. They also get access to the new emerging technologies that will be possible because of the frequencies freed up by the analog broadcasts going away. Older TVs will need a digital tuner/converter in order to work.
The government will also reap billions from auctioning off the current analog TV frequencies. Consumers will in turn pay for those billions when they buy the new products. This makes legislators happy because they get to collect billions of dollars without it being obvious that people are being taxed.
I personally think it needs to be done. Those frequencies need to be made available, and unlike much of the legislation, the people who are paying for it, actually get a benefit from it in the form of better quality pictures and sound.
to expensive to die.
I work for a PBS affiliate, and we just bit the bullet last year and bought the new transmitter and other bits to broadcast digital. I believe it cost us $800,000 plus reoccurring expenses. Our electricity bill per month can be several thousand dollars. And we still have 5 transmitters left to convert in my state. Once most stations convert to digital, the only thing they can afford to do is take their analog signal and convert it to digital. It looks horrible, but it's cheap. All the pretty demos you see at Best Buy are meant to make you buy the TV. It will be a long time before most stations can/will actually make content to look like that.
As far as my opinion as a consumer, it's WAY to expensive. I just bought a new TV several years ago because I could not wait any longer for a relatively inexpensive digital TV. Yes, new TVs will be probably can contain a digital receiver, but I don't like it. Most of the television engineers I talk with recommend you buy the TV and the receiver separately. Ypu know in a few years receivers will be better, with great new features they say you can't live without. The TV is not going to get much better, but receivers will.
And for those of you who don't want to buy a new TV just to get a digital signal(myself included), most of the receivers I have seen will transcode the signal for your current analog TV. That's what I going to do anyway.
The government...is between a rock and a hard place, with sales of HDTVs slower than expected,
Slow Sales? Well what do they expect! What's the salary of the average tv watcher (4 hours a day of viewing) and what part of that is disposable income? Now what part of this disposable income do you think they will have to spend on a tv that right now will not really even make their watching experience moderately more enjoyable??? Come on. And now they want to increase this cost? The only way they're going to move these things at the pace they want is if the price drops dramatically or they start giving them away to people.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Now address the digital modulation (how the bits get into the RF spectrum). This is where HDTV falls on its face. At the same signal level where you would just minimally get a snow-free NTSC analog picture (grade B), DTV totally breaks up and you get nothing but occaisional flashes through the blue muck. The only way DTV is really going to work outside of metropolitan areas is for either the metro TV stations to crank up the power on the order of 50-100 MW-ERP, or start dropping in repeater stations around grade B areas (where previously this was only done well beyond grade B, now it will have to be done within). Another option the FCC has is to have a rule that bans any laws, restrictions, or covenants against erecting the necessary outdoor antenna to gain new signal strength. Cable is an option, but it has to stay an option; it cannot be a requirement. OTA must remain viable.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars