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Japan's TV Broadcasts To Be All-Digital By 2011
Azuma writes "Officially, Japan will end Analog broadcasting by year 2011. Terrestrial digital television broadcasting services started on Monday, December 1st in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, with Japan Broadcasting Corp (NHK) and private TV stations broadcasting special commemorative programs. The services will initially be available to around 12 million households. Here is an article from Chinaview. The Daily Yomiuri reports that small local TV stations are at a disadvantage due to high costs of the new technology."
You could allways use a digital to analogue converter on the old TVs, at least if you have cable, satilite, or an external antennae.
Eventually all the new TVs will be digital and thus come down in price, so it won't be that much of a problem.
So now seems like an appropriate time to tell you how the story came out. I recently bought a MyHD 120 card, and am very happy with the card (I plan on buying a couple more). However I can only get one Digital channel so far, and they're not broadcasting true HD yet. Digital does look nice, very nice, DVD nice, but still isn't HD. There is one channel in the area broadcasting HD, but I can't pull it in, even though I just bought a 3 foot square UHF antenna to do so. There are supposed to be 8 channels in my area broadcasting Digital, and I can only get one. And only one of the 8 are broadcasting HD (which I can't get as mentioned), and then for only about half of prime time hours. I'm told by sales people that the stations are only broadcasting currently at half power, but I have no way to confirm this. Even the one channel that comes in strong (full meter), suffers occasional complete drops, very much like early cell phone use. While the HD picture is probably going to be glorious (and digital is already very good), they really fell down on the job when it came to the carrier signal, and I think it safe to say VSB was an extremely poor choice. People are use to a signal fading in and out on analog, but still be viewable (you can still follow the story or hear the audio), when a sizable portion have digital, and find they loose signal completely from time to time, well there will be hell to pay. The FCC has quite the mess on its hands.
BTW, when the one channel I do get is not in primetime, I switch to the analog sister station. The upconvert of local programing is like a 56k streaming video. Painful to watch.
A year later and the Quest goes on.
Letter To Iran
sweden is shutting down all public analog (terrestial) broadcasts in february 2008, why wait until 2011?
Just to ensure that people are aware of the fact -- Samir Gupta is not a PhD, does not work for Nintendo, and is one of Slashdot's more colorful frauds. You can see the beginning of the Samir Gupta hoax on USENET years ago, in early discussions on the Sega Genesis.
However, an amazing number of new people with mod points, impressed with the bogus credentials, frequently mod up his posts.
May we never see th
Over there in Germany, the state of Berlin and Brandenburg is shutting down analog broadcasting also. People on welfare without enough money to buy a digital receiver will get one nearly for free from the state. Nice, huh?
I think Germany's goals are somewhat close to Japan's in terms of "digital only" TV.
Quotes from http://www.digitv.fi:
- Finland entered the digital era when the multiplex representatives started up digital television broadcasts on 27th August 2001. This means that there are now six new television channels in three multiplexes, and the four existing channels can be received as digital parallel broadcasts. Viewers have a total of ten channels to choose from.
- The area of digital broadcasts covers over 70% of the population. The television broadcasting network is to be digitalised in phases. The process is due to be complete at the end of 2006, when approx. 99% of Finns will reside within the transmission area of digital television.
- The government has set up a target that the analogue broadcasting discontinues at the end of 2006.