Slashdot Mirror
USDTV Announces Low-Cost, Localized Digital TV
pagercam2 writes "According to a CNN story, USDTV is about to roll out a new digital TV service, the difference being that it doesn't use cable or a satellite. They stream the DigitalTV signals on currently idle frequencies to standard UHF/VHF antennas. The service includes 35 channels, including local stations as well as many of the basic cable (Disney, Discovery, ESPN, TLC, FOOD...) with more to come. $19.95/mo is the price point for a basic service, though '...customers must buy a $99.95 set-top device to decode the channels.' Initially to be rolled out in Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Albuquerque, could USDTV keep prices low and still support local content since they have no cable network to maintain, and no satellites to launch?"
The UK have has a DigitalTV service that broadcasts to standard antenni for a little while now. FreeView
Not only do we use DVB-T in the UK, there is also a cheap PCI card from hauppage which is supported in Linux (after a lot of driver fiddling) and works perfectly with mythtv. It is therefore nice and easy to set up a mythtv box without being a slave to the cable company or satellite company and having full control over everything. New channels get added all the time and they are basically multiplexes over individual channels (ie; what would be one analog channel is a mux of about 8 channels, though most of those are used for crap!) Check out the dvb-t linux docs and mythtv docs if you want to know more. There are a few main muxes all of which are encoded slightly differently (and so some channels do not get as good reception as others, BBC 1/2 are much clearer than ITV2 and Channel 5). The channels are basically MPEG2 streams so if you record them raw, they can be easily converted onto DVD with no analog problems. At its peak the dvb-t service when operated by ITV digital had about 60 channels IIRC. It is a great piece of technology but is not well suited to private companies IMHO.
Warhammer forums