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Court Upholds FCC's 2007 Deadline For Digital TV
phil reed writes "According to this article on Digital Spy, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has upheld a Federal Communications Commission ruling requiring that all TVs with 13-inch screens or larger must be equipped with a digital tuner by July 2007. FCC press release here (warning - PDF document). The Court specifically cited foot-dragging on the part of the industry, and noted the chicken-and-egg problem. Here's the Washington Post story." sdriver writes adds a link to CNN's coverage.
So analog TV broadcasts are to stop on December 2006, but putting digital tuners in TVs isn't required until July 2007, and electronics manufacturers are resisting the requirement to put the tuners in? Something doesn't make sense here!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Two words: broadcast flag.
Besides which, it's meaningless anyway. Most people have cable. I fail to see what wonderful future digital broadcasts are intended to bring us to, besides DRM.
Last point, it'll take 20 years plus before all the old-style TVs are phased out. Upon my approximate checkout date of 2030, maybe then digital TV will be mainstream.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
This is an issue because it forces the electronics industry to be the "chicken" and pay a kind of "early adopter" cost associated with switching to digital broadcasting.
This way, they all have to make digital-capable sets. Then the broadcasters will have less of a problem switching to digital; right now they complain that there are not enough people who will receive it to justify spending the money on the switch. Then once there are digital broadcasts, the electronics company will have even more of a reason to finish the switch, and so on. Getting the ball rolling is the hard part, and that's what this law does.
So both sides will start going to digital, and everything will be happy. Except for the broadcast flag issue, and pvr issues, and a bunch more issues that I'm sure exist.
requiring every TV sold have a digital tuner in them means that you can not get a TV with out one...which means that:
a) the industry can no longer offer high end TVs only for HD signals
b) all TVs will be able to see the copyright bit
c) the consumer will get stuck with a tuner that will be smart enough not to play signals that are not watermarked.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
...when analogue broadcasts are switched off in the UK, TV licensing won't be able to claim possession of an analogue-only TV is cause for obtaining a license, just to own a set for gaming or watching tapes or DVDs on.
I wonder if anyone has sussed this yet? I'm sure console manufacturers will continue to produce aerial adaptors, or someone else will...
I know the article pertains directly to US broadcasts, but it's an interesting parallel.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
I'd be glad to see Congress tell broadcasters that we're going to take back the free spectrum they were given if they don't start using it for digital TV in the next n months.
In other words, use it or lose it.
I'm sure there are folks out there that would be happy to start up digital-only stations if they could get free spectrum to do it.
It's great to mandate the sale of digital-capable TV's, but increasing the amount of digital broadcasts will give consumers a reason to demand these things.
It would be more cost effective to levy a small fee to the broadcast stations on the air spectrum (owned by the public anyways!) and simply give the damn decoders away to the minority of TV watchers that will need them.
Stats:
107 million TV households.
94 million cable or satellite subscribing households.
13 million only use it for VCR/DVD or maybe they watch broadcast TV with rabbit ears.
Why are 94 million people paying an extra $200-$500 PER TV SET for the benefit of less than 10 million broadcast TV viewers?
GRR! bureaucrats!
Does this remind anyone else of the toilet regulation where, in order to save water, now you can't buy a toilet in the US that actually flushes anything down. So, in order to use these new tiolets effectively, people have to flush 3 times (or make trips North of the border)... all in the name of saving water. This digital TV crap is just another example of an attempt to regulate something that doesn't need regulating. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
My guess is that consumers will not go for this at all. I predict that TV sales will slump in the short term while some people won't want to buy anything until the digital stuff comes out. And, TV sales will slump in the long term when people refuse to replace a perfectly good existing TV with something where they don't perceive any added value. Honestly, with how often I find myself flipping channels aimlessly waiting to find something good on TV, if this went into effect right now and I couldn't watch anything on my existing set I'd probably end up just reading more rather than running out to the store to get plugged in to nothing again.
Dude, i've been alive quite a while. I have never seen a case where the US government was able to politically sustain devaluing existing citizens' property on a mass basis.
I draw your attention back to the leaded/unleaded gas issue. The switchover happened in 1975 as I remember it. However, no one required that the older vehicles get off the road. You could still readily find leaded gas as late as the early 80's. Even then, the older vehicles without catalytic converters are still on the road to some extent (most of the people who own them have changed the valves, I think. Something about copper being destroyed without the lead-based lubricants being there). Point being you can still use your car.
I guarantee you those TVs will still be useful in 2020 and maybe even 2025. When a sufficient majority of the public no longer owns an old-style tv set, that is when things will change.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Personally, I'm planning to buy a projector by then. Today you can get a brand new XGA resolution 1000 lumens projector for under a thousand dollars. I should think that full-HD-res 2000 lumens DLP projectors will be only a couple grand at that point, or less; And XGA 1000 lumens projectors will be about $500. Two of those and a video card that does dual monitor spanning will get you a 2048x768 display, not too shabby. Now all I need is a bigger wall.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's an interlaced 720x480 so it's pretty ugly even for that...
And once you watch a couple things in 1080i or 720p you'll see just how bad 480i looks. A friend of mine has a plasma (a 1024x1024 one, not a crappy 852xWhatever one). It's still not at native HDTV resolutions, but holy shit...The difference is staggering, especially on live events (it really shines on sports). And it's picked up over a little antenna on the roof (pretty much all of the broadcast channels in the Bay Area are broadcasting ATSC already and probably half of primetime and 1/2 of sports are in HDTV)
The only problem with it is that now whenever any of us try to watch something that's in analog we have to turn it off because it looks like it's out of focus. Yes, this is even compared to the "DVD Quality" directv (dvd quality my ass, it's full of compression artifacts...but better than digital cable, that's for sure)
How much did NTSC tuners cost at first? Come on, say it. Probably hundreds of dollars.
An NTSC tuner module (rectangular metal can you get on PCI tuner cards and inside VCRs & TVs) doesn't cost $5 now. Try finding a television without one.
Do you honestly think that an ATSC tuner will still cost $200 a set? Once you sell ten million or so of these things, I believe the cost for the chips will probably go under $10.
By the way, there is a loophole. Call it a _monitor_, not a TV. That way there aren't any internal tuners required of any kind. Nor is closed captioning, v-chip, etc required. Not that those are expensive either, probably a couple dollars a set.
By the way, please give a source for those stats. Those stats also don't say how many of those subscribing households have _all_ TVs hooked up to a cable box.
I'm living in Japan right now working for a major electonics manufacturer. Over here the trend is moving toward something they call Broadband Television (BBTV - the Japanese truly are obsessed with snappy acronyms).
The idea is that compliant TVs would be able to received digital data both through traditional channels and by streaming content from the internet.
I'm not absolutely sure that it'll fly, but I'm under the impression that almost every one of our competitors is racing toward the same goal of having this consumer-ready by next Fall.
Maybe the US government should contemplate waiting until this next generation of broadcast technology is tested before passing final judgement on what is or isn't required.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
I have to use racing fuel/small airplane fuel in mine. The fuel is 102-110 Octane lead gas. The motor is a 1970 Buick 455; back in the day (during the lead gas years, and for a while after phase-out) Premium Gas was 100-102 octane. Most people who own these old engines decide to stick with the high compression (10.50:1 in my car, before the heads were decked, now about 12:1) in the engine, and the soft valve seats. We just buy gas in 55 gallon drums (or pull up to the pump at small airports, and pay 2.50-3.50 a gallon).
That Octane Booster doesn't really help, all it does is pollute, and foul plugs (most of it is not even flamable).
As for gas milage -- I have my 455 in my Camaro, it pulls 10's on the track; but when driven on the street gets about 19/22 miles per gallon.
Personally, I think digital broadcast TV could be a Bad Thing if it ever reaches the point where it pushes analog broadcasting into the trashcan of history.
:)
When a digital signal is disrupted, the affected segment of the broadcast is toast... no video or audio. Consumer-grade equipment can not pull a usable signal from the garbage.
An analog broadcast on the other hand, can take quite a bit of interference and still provide a reasonable (you can understand it) video and/or audio signal.
I prefer a durable system to one that is more advanced but fails completely when it runs into a bit of interference.
Then again, I am probably not the person to listen to regarding home entertainment. I only have a b/w tv that can run off of a car battery... when I want to watch color cable/dvd/etc. I have a nice PC/meida setup that is up to the task. If I want to see a movie on a screen larger than 19", I go to a theater.
Why waste money on home electronics when I can spend it on computer equipment that provides the same functionality?
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. ~A. Perlis
I agree that TV is stupid, and I myself don't watch programming, and I didn't watch DVD's until I ran across Greencine.com. But empirically speaking, Americans who don't own TVs are really snooty.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
... it's the aerial. In the UK, the govt. wants everyone to be on digital by 2010. Clearly, that ain't gonna happen, and one of the major reasons is that a lot of people will need to have a new antenna fitted just to get a good enough signal.
Unlike analgoue TV which is still watchable with poor reception, with digital it's all or nothing: perfect picture or blank screen. I don't have exact figures but I know quite a lot of people will require a new "broadband" antenna, and every digital TV or STB comes with a big warning message about it (the situation may be better in the US). Talk about a good way to put people off!
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC