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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."
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.
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
...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
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?
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
(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.
Your wife is that boring, eh?
I don't think it's her head that people want to see four feet across...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
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.