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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
jumping at the bit
Did you mean chomping at the bit or jumping at the chance?
Whatever you meant, don't count your chickens before they cross the road.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
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
I have to agree with this one - this is a business decision.
Give me a reason to upgrade my TV, a purpose of spending another $300-$500 dollars so I can get what I get now.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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."
Ok, how long ago did the digital TV specs get finalized? How much bandwidth do they take up? How much more could we squeeze into that spectrum if they re-did it taking into account those fabulous new mpeg4 codecs that allow DVD quality data streams for only 150-200 KB/s.
...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 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
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
The Australian government has already declared by 2008 all TV transmissions will be exclusively digital. Digital signal is available now, and although the picture quality is very good (not quite DVD quality, but better than any video or free-to-air signal outside the studio) - it seems nobody wants it.
TVs with digital decoders built in are just coming on the market, as are HDTVs... for the rest of us there is a $600 odd decoder to buy to make our perfectly working analogue TV work with digital.
The government here doesn't even seem interested in making spectrum available for use in other purposes as the new digital TV channels are largely in between the existing analogue channels ! (except for channel 0,1,2 which suffer interference due to their frequency)
Continous arguments by the govt and media companies haven't yet settled on arrangements for multi-channeling, or data-over-TV or any of the other cool digital TV features. Some media companies want some features, other want different ones. Insert much political nonsense... lather, rince, repeat.
At the moment, it's just 'normal' TV that you receive through a digtal black box.
After 2008 there is supposed to be no more analogue signal. No more spare TV in the bedroom. All need a digital decoder to function as they did before.
Oh, did I mention that we use a digital format that is almost completely incompatible with every other worldwide format?
Digital TV? Looks nice, government, but tell me why I need it and not why you want it!
Don't jump in to digital TV too quickly, guys, it resulting mess is not worth it...
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?
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
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.
If nobody really wants digtal TV, then why push it? There's no need to rush. With Tivo undercutting traditional revenue methods, the Internet revolutionizing distribution and ruining distribution control, Wireless and P2P poised to exacerbate the whole situation, and the Spectrum subject to all manners of demand, controversy, and newer more efficient and effective technologies, we might as well wait.
It may take a while to get this mess all sorted out and there's doubtless significant improvements on the way. Maybe traditional commercial-driven networks will collapse. Maybe small-scale production and distribution will really take off with the enablers we're just starting to see. Maybe someone will come up with a generalized wireless system that is so good everyone wants to switch to it. In the long run it'll probably be better to go without for a few years until all the pieces fall in place, than to have ourselves saddled by an ever more complex and restrictive arrangement.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
(unfortunately I can't take credit for this one. It was written by a fellow slashdotter a while back, and I've lost the attribution. If the author is still out there, let me know and I'll send you a beer ;-) )
For those interested in a brief history of HDTV, here it is:
Here's how it went:
Broadcast Industry asks for bandwidth for HDTV
FCC says "OK, we'll set aside bandwidth for HDTV"
FCC says "What standards?"
Industry says 'No Standards Please' and come up with EIGHTEEN recommended formats for HDTV. I am not shitting you.
FCC says "Isn't 18 different standards a bit much?"
Industry says "Shut the fuck up FCC, we know what we are doing. The 'market' will handle this!"
Consumer Electronics dudes whine "18 formats make every thing cost more, you are fucking us!"
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."
Industry says "What? We really just want the free bandwidth. You really want us to do HDTV??
Congress says "Fuck you Industry. Broadcast HDTV or we'll legislate your asses back to Sun-day!"
Industry says "We're fucked. 18 formats? Why the hell did we do that? Let's change it."
Consumer Electronics dudes say "You ain't changing shit. We are already building the boxes you said you wanted built."
FCC says "Yah, ya boneheads we told you 18 was too many, now you gotta live with it."
Industry says "Well FCC, will you at least make the cable companies carry the HDTV at no charge?"
Cable companies say "Fuck you! You gotta pay! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!"
FCC says "Yep, no federal mandated on HDTV must carry, we are letting 'the market' handle that"
Industry says "We are so fucked. We are spending 5-10 million per TV station in hardware alone and have 1000 HDTV viewers per city, even in LA!"
Consumer at home says "Where is my HDTV? Why does it cost so much? Fuck it, I'm sticking with cable/DirecTV."
Consumer electronics dudes, broadcast industry, FCC, and congress all cry. Cable companies laugh and make even bigger profits.
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.
They want digitial tuners in TV's. But they didn't say they wanted HDTV tuners in TV's. At first I thought there wasn't a difference, but now I'm not sure. Couldn't you digitize a NTSC signal as easily as a HDTV signal and pipe it through a digital tuner? Also, what does this have to do with DishNet, DirecTV and all the cable companies? DishNet and DirecTV already use digital signals to broadcast NTSC-quality stuff to US televisions, and cable companies aren't using any of the airwaves (they use cable). Also, cable companies are selling digital cable now to people with NTSC televisions (analog tuners). I don't see the big deal here. So what if broadcasters are forced to send all their stuff in digital. I haven't used an antenna on my TV in over 15 years. Cable and dish companies even force you to keep your TV on channel 3 anyway and use a converter, so why not just use a monitor, or the video/audio-in ports on your TV and bypass ALL tuners?
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.
Your wife is that boring, eh?
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.
I don't think it's her head that people want to see four feet across...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
We go to my chum's house for all our wrestling pay per views. He has digital cable and what I like to consider is the world's finest tube TV, SONY's 40 inch XBR. It's huge and does good interpolation and comb filtering to make your LQ broadcasts look HQ.
We have come to realise, in every high motion scene, how much digital sucks. Words on screen have no bandwidth to display sharply, flying bodies are turned into blocky messes and gradual swaths of colour are graduated in the ugliest fashion. Blacks aren't black.
Furthermore, the interruption of the signal for any reason means clicking audio and ugly block breaks. We've missed a lot of important, not to be repeated events and phrases due to these breaks. In an analog signal, a break results in a picture that is still visible, sound which may be obscured by fuzz but which is audible, because you don't have to wait for the next "frame" to begin before you can start viewing. And this is over a cable line...digital broadcast signals will only mean a still worse situation.
Every time we miss something, or catch an ugly jagged edge, or have what should be a crisp beautiful colour destroyed by the "high bandwidth" compression, we just turn to my big-TV friend, who pays more for cable every month than I do on my school payments, and say "Dude, digital sucks." He agrees.
(Yes, we are those lamos who order these stupid things -- we're five skilled college grads who like wrestling, f*ck off)
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
If televisions don't fit the bill, and there is a need, then alternatives will be found. Maybe the broadcasters aren't jumping on this bandwagon because it's not worth jumping on.
The broadcasters will do anything to give themselves a competitive advantage. Obviously high definition TV isn't giving an advantage at all. Sure they say the reason it isn't advantageous is because most people don't have high def capable TVs. Why is that? Is there a standard for these hi-def tuners yet? There are probably 16 standards, which is exactly as bad as none at all.
I don't buy that argument that the tuners are too expensive. $200 is cheap. So what if there aren't many hi-def broadcasts, if hi-def is what you want you'll buy a tuner. I bought my dvd player pretty early in the game, and I can guarantee you I paid more than $200 for it. And there were like 6 movies available. But it was cool, and I shucked out the cash. I still use that same dvd player too.
The problem with hi-def is that it just isn't that great of an improvement. It isn't worth all the ass-clowning required to make it happen, so it doesn't, and it shouldn't. Except now the Big Gov is coming in to force it happen. Once the Big Gov starts taking control of something, they never ever relinquish that control. It's like a cancer, and if you don't fight it diligently, it will get wildly out of control. So now we are going to be stuck with a bunch of lame ass broadcasters pumping out hi-def, and when someone invents the better/cheaper/cooler solution, none of the broadcasters are going to jump on that because they have too much frickin cash layed into their crappy hi-def broadcasts.
We might get new broadcast startups if the cost of entry were reduced, except now the cost of entry is increased because you've got to have this craptacular high-def technology.
Seriously... look at the facts.
The HDTV stuff has all the consumers confused. Digital cable, DirecTV, digital receiver, HDTV receiver... hey, guess what, they're not really related in any way. I just bought an NTSC TV, because I know whatever comes out next can be adapted to it.
Add on top of that, the studios are apparently objecting to us watching their shows at different times by using PVRs. They want to kill them dead in their tracks.
THEN it gets decided that ads should run DURING the shows, in a little square in the bottom corner.
The end result? We, the consumers, shell out more money, are forced to watch shows when the networks decide that we should, and then are forced to watch MORE advertising. The entire TV industry appears to be going to pot. I think I'd rather pay $40/mo for a gym membership than cable, and I'd feel better in the end.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq