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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."
At least Japan is giving more time than the FCC is. The FCC deadline of 2006 just isn't going to happen. something like 98-99% of Americans have a television. More Americans have a TV than have telephone service at home. A sizable number of these folks probably don't have the money to just run out to Best Buy and buy a new television because the FCC says they have to. I expect to see a bunch of noise made in the news about this once the deadline approaches, followed by lots of Congressional campaigns running on the "The big bad federal government wants to take away your TV... over my dead body!" platform. This will likely lead to the analog/digital cutover deadline being pushed back significantly.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
I'll get a digital TV tuner when one is bundled in a video game console that I want. That's why I have a DVD player.
This still won't improve Japanese television much. All the shows come down to 4 types:
davejenkins.com |
Viewers will replace about 100 million old TV sets
Hmm... Just 8 years for the population to replace all of their TVs sounds a little quick. Or does absolutely everyone in Japan replace their equipment way often?
Wouldn't lots of people be pissed off if such a change was announced in the USA? Your opinions are welcome.
If they have to ask, then they should just give up now.
Sex - Find It
Sure, our digital broadcasts aren't HDTV quality over here, but we've had Digital TV via Satellite for over 5 years now, and over cable and terrestrial for not that much shorter a time. Digital TV receivers are virtually free now (a non-subscription box can be had for around 50 pounds, so that shows how cheap the hardware is).
... I suspect price gauging of the poor old consumer, even if the receivers are more modern and HDTV, etc.
So why the costs for receivers are so high in Japan I don't know
HDTV capable TV sets are still extremely expensive though, but they aren't a necessity for receiving digital TV.
The new PSX (Playstation3?) will support terrestrial digital here in Japan - as well as being a DVD and PVR - a really very sweet device.
What I want to see are Digital TV decoder cards for PCs. I can then just capture the TV on my PC and playback Hi-Def onto my TV without having to buy any other hardware. However there seems to be no sign of them. I guess teh MPAA (and local equivalents) are very scared that users will work around their "not-recordable" bits in the video stream.
Gavin
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
I'm starting to suspect that the United States will never see conversion.
We have fast enough and cheap enough hardware now that it's feasible (nicer) home connections to stream down much-better-than-TV video over an Internet connection. There are a number of improvements to make in upstream distribution structure, but ultimately, despite the fact that IP currently provides essentially nothing by way of real-time guarantees, my guess is that we'll slowly start seeing more and more Internet-based systems. It just doesn't make sense to have a single purpose dedicated system just for TV.
I suspect that those cheap consumer broadband routers will start having a "smart bandwidth allocation" feature that the ISP will also grok which guarantees real-time delivery (well, over the last and slowest leg of the trip). It wouldn't be a very difficult system to devise -- system on local network allocates bandwidth from router, router talks to upstream system.
A healthy amount of precaching would be important -- this could be an issue in sports, where having a sub-one-minute precache is essential to many hardcore fans. It'd work wonderfully for almost anything else, though.
May we never see th
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
Everytime I see an article or hear a discussion about DTV transitions, I hear a bunch of people ranting and raving about buying new TVs, or how their TV that Moses brought down from the mount works just fine and you can pry it from their cold, dead hands. It really does crack me up when you consider what's realistically going to go into this transition.
First of all, The US deadline is now 2007, not 2006, per random circuit court.
A) 108 million households in the US have televisions. Of those, just over 70% subscribe to cable or satellite. Satellite subscribers don't have a thing to worry about in this transition (unless they don't spend the $6/month to get televised local stations, which is definitely worth avoiding ghosting and reception issues). Satellite users really don't have to worry about this at all, since the sat systems will probably keep broadcasting in the same manner they were before the change; essentially a slightly differently implemented digital signal. Local stations will be transmitted in the same manner, and the signals will be decoded by their existing set-top box. No pain. Cable carriers could, in theory, take the exisitng off-air digital signals, convert them back to analog, and send them along over the lines (I'm not sure if any of the FCC rules have forbid this), although with continued uptake on digital cable services, they'll basically be in a situation similar to the satellite carriers. Of course, assuming they're not allowed to to retransmit in analog, it'll be back to how it was 10 or 15 years ago before cable-ready TVs hit the market; a $4 or $5/month (maybe even $10) for the box, with the option to purchase per FCC rules. The boxes still patch into the TV using the standard interfaces (composite/S-Video, RF for the old crap, maybe component or DVI for newer equipment).
That leaves the off-air folks, the remaining 30%. Now consider what off-air DTV is. It isn't neccessarily HD (HD is a subset of Digital). DTV is MPEG-2 encoded video with dolby digital/AC-3 audio and 480 lines of resolution. Know what else uses that same video system? If you said the $20 DVD player they had on sale last friday, you're right. Essentially, you need an IC capable of decoding the stream, an antenna to get the signal in, and some RF equipment that can tune to that signal. In bulk, we're talking maybe $50, especially considering these won't be purchased for at least another 3 years. THe current cost of outboard ATSC tuners is mostly due to the fact that there's a very small market actually looking for them and the fact that they're typically designed to a little higher standards, given that they're usually interfacing to nicer HD equipment.
So the remaining 30% of people breaks down thusly: people who don't care enough about TV to invest in cable or satellite, and people who can't afford to invest in cable or satellite. The former group might have one or two TVs (they don't care enough, remember), so using my random $50 price point (which I think is reasonably believable), they can retrofit their existing equipment for $100, or simply put that $100 into buying a new TV. You can get a new TV for $100, and if they buy it at that time, it'll be DTV capable (see below). For the people who are too poor to afford cable or sat, well, they were obviously capable of scraping together enough to get a TV. Not to be heartless here, but TV is not a right, and if you could afford to get one you can probably afford to save up $50.
This all counts out the fact that one of the circuit courts of appeal upheld the ruling that all TVs larger than 13" are required to have a DTV tuner starting 2006 (I think it's '06).
So what we basically have is a lot of handwringing over a bunch of scaremongering by media outlets ("current DTV boxes cost hundreds of dollars", "of course they do, there's not a huge demand for them") and the lack of understanding of simple television systems by a lot of people. Folks, it's gonna be a cheap-ass box that hooks into your cable jack or A/V input and tunes to a channel. It's not rocket science. You can go back to watching your 15 year-old wood-panel TV now, and you can keep watching it for years to come.
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.
Come on - this is TV for crying out loud - does anyone actually give two shits if they watch Friends in analog or digital? And if they do, why on earth is the government involved? I can understand a government taking a high profile role in healthcare, pensions, crime fighting, defense, etc., but TELEVISION?
If the logic goes that they are preventing a standards war, my question stands - who cares? Maybe if the TV industry wastes enough money on a standards war, TV would become expensive enough that more people will question their viewing habits.
Without any goverment intervention, TV will become digital one way or another, eventually, just by natural technological progression. Why are we wasting tax dollars trying to hurry it along? Is it that freakin' important?
I can understand tax dollars trying to hurry along progression of medical technologies, defense technologies, communication technologies, but TV?? Who cares?
Don't give me that line about educational TV like PBS/Discovery Channel/TLC - they're great I know, but really, do they get that much greater in digital? I didn't think so.
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.
While it is true that it _can_ provide better quality, it can also provide _lower_ quality. It is all down to how much compression the broadcaster puts on the video.
This is more than amply illustrated by the UK digital satellite broadcasts by Sky, where compression artifacts are highly noticeable. An example being the green pitches during soccer matches. The high compression looks at the pitch and says, that all looks quite similar, and renders it as a big green blocky splodge.
Spectrum is a valuable commodity, do you really think commercial broadcasters are going to "waste" it on picture quality, when they could squeeze in another three TV channels - ignoring all of the extra advertising revenue that could bring?
As far as English news sources in Japan go, I've always found the Daily Yoimuri highly dubious and I really don't see how a Chinese newspaper is relevant. Here's the story from the Japan Times, which I read this morning over my granola, thinking "Jeez, I should send this to Slashdot."
This story is pretty close to my heart since I'm working on a project in Japan right now that aspires to distribute digital TV content via the internet instead of conventional channels. My understanding is that every major electronics manufacturer in Japan is working on the same sort of thing, so reading that the Japanese government "has vowed to phase out analog broadcasting by 2011" doesn't necessarily mean that this country is headed the same way as the US. As usual, Japan will most likely do its own thing.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
It is in fact silly to think that in 8 years, every television will have to be replaced by a HDTV because of a sudden revolution.
Why, already a large number of people have broadband internet connections in their home. (At least here in Europe you can easily get 8Mbit for a very reasonable price)
So chances are, in 1 or 2 years, some bright mind will start providing for all early adopting tech geeks by streaming HDTV standard compliant video from his website. This would only require an upgrade of whatever media player they'll be using.
Soon after people will develop cheap (linux based, ofcourse!) standalone players that only require a monitor and an xDSL connection. A surge in HDTV set sales will be the result.
Why should HDTV emerge from the same, centrally directed, mass-oriented cable companies? When did they develop something new? It will happen, but not in the form you're thinking of.