US Still Dithering Over Analog-Digital TV Conversion

Robin Ingenthron writes "As 2007 gets closer, the legislation to postpone mandatory transition from Analog TV broadcast to Digital is taking shape. Here's an idea - make the broadcasters pay to use the airwaves (they get both analog and digital spectrum for free). For that matter, why permanently auction the bandwidth to cell phone companies, why not rent it to them too? Each postponement keeps the Fed budget in the red, so consumers have a choice -- between analog (black borders on the sides of their digital TVs) and digital (black borders on the top and bottom of their analog TV)."

Comments

Re:baffling, can anyone explain?

[stratjakt]

They aren't permanently sold, they're licensed. The FCC is taking back VHF and UHF, after all. They couldn't do that if they were "owned" like property.

And they do pay licensing fees, application fees, they pay a huge fee to petition the FCC to increase their broadcast power and range, for instance.

Digital != black borders

[sunderland56]

between analog (black borders on the sides of their digital TVs) and digital (black borders on the top and bottom of their analog TV)

Digital versus analog is NOT the same as aspect ratio. The two concepts have little, if anything, to do with one another.

If your television screen's aspect ratio matches the aspect ratio of the program being broadcast, you will have no black bars. If the two do not match, you will have black bars, whether or not the broadcast is in an analog or digital form. I've got a Sony 36" HD set at home that has a 4:3 aspect ratio screen - no black bars when watching analog TV (or 4:3 digital broadcasts such as Fox).

Side rant: if you watch NBC digital, you get #(*&^%# annoying GREY bars on the sides. On dimly lit shows, those grey bars are much brighter than anything else in the room - annoying beyond belief.

Re:No thanks, spend the money elsewhere please.

[Ironsides]

In my experience digital TV pictures are actually worse quality than traditional broadcast TV. Because the entire image is MPEG-2 encoded, even a tiny bit of interference can cause the screen to freeze or display brightly coloured artifacts.

That is not a tiny ammount of interference. DTV uses almost 50% of its bandwidth for Forward Error Correction (FEC). It takes a lot to take the signal off the air unless you are near the boundaries or reception, which with analog would get you a pretty poor picture anyway. As for the artifacts? That has to do with the encoder, not the signal. Don't even compare this to VCD, I work around these pictures every day and can see how much higher quality they are than regular TVs.

The delay? They new that would happen from the begining. If you know about Iframes, remember that they have to wait till they recieve one till they can actually start showing a picture. A half second delay at most under the current way of broadcasting. And yes, I do mean a half second AT MOST, unless you have a poor quality decoder.

Upping the bandwidth would not change this. Changing the LongGOP of the MPEG structure would, but that would require more bandwidth to keep the same quality. As for quality? They can set it from 19.4Mbps to 0Mbps for the ammount of bandwidth they use for a signal. 19.4 is way above DVD quality so don't diss it. What was probably happening is that they were reducing the ammount of bandwidth dedicated to the subchannel you were watching to another channel. Most stations will only use 4 sub channels at most under the current scheme of things. 4 channels being the most number of Standard Deffinition [720x480I] that you can fit into 19.4Mbps under most circumstances and maintain quality.