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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)."
I really don't know why the federal government is selling the rights that the individual States should be doing. Each state should have the right to lease or sell spectrum. That includes keeping your spectrum off other peoples land (interstates) unless there is an agreement between states. At the local level, I would never outright sell a commodity without some kind of royalties in return - think about land property tax we all pay; so why isn't there a property value assets towards the highly valuable spectrum? This would allow the state to boot venders that violate some quality standard and re-sell it to a better vendor if the state (local population) decides to.
McCain's measure would require broadcasters to air only digital television signals by 2009 and help consumers who rely on traditional television sets buy devices that would convert digital back into a format that they could watch.
"Consumers who rely on over-the-air television, particularly those of limited economic means, should be assisted," according to the draft obtained by Reuters.
How about we just not mandate that the signals go all digital? I have said it before... The taxpayers are getting fucked TWICE on this deal. We have to pay for the mandate to happen and we have to pay for the fucking digital tuners as well all for something that I really don't care to have anyway. TV isn't that important as it is, especially stuff that comes OTA so why do we need to waste billions of dollars on this technology? Just so I can watch the Vikings lose or the Simpsons have another bad season in digital quality? No thanks... How about you spend that money on regulating the corporations that deliver content over cable and telephone? Personally I am more interested in that digital information.
And because I don't want a digital set/tuner I won't be able to watch TV without it. I am assuming I wouldn't be one of those people that are considered acceptable for help...
It's baffling to me how the "public airwaves" (read: any frequency band at all) can be permanently "sold" to anything. It should all be rented from the public. The companies should have to pay a rental tax, that gets used to discount individual income taxes. That's paying for something that belongs to the PUBLIC!
stuff |
First of all, digital TV isn't necessarily HDTV. 480i digital broadcasts are perfectly possible. In addition, HDTV broadcasts don't have to be 16:9, although they frequently are. It's also worth remembering that the analog to digital spectrum change only applies to over the air broadcasts; cable companies can do as they wish, and pretty much all satellite broadcasts have been digital for a while now.
TV isn't a right. TV is for entertainment and education, both of which you can get elsewhere. The government assisting people with television upgrades is such a huge waste of money. If you can't afford a television upgrade yourself, then you have a few years to start saving.
First off I'm clueless, so someone 'splain it to me...
Why not let the market decide what it can support instead of forcing an upgrade on everyone?
crazy dynamite monkey
One has to wonder if we would be dealing with the broadcast flag and all that other crap if the government would simply let HDTV develop on it's own.
Computer companies have no problem combining forces and devising standards. Why not let the broadcasters do the same?
TV isn't a right. TV is for entertainment and education, both of which you can get elsewhere. The government assisting people with television upgrades is such a huge waste of money. If you can't afford a television upgrade yourself, then you have a few years to start saving.
It's the fscking government that's forcing the broadcasters to switch! It wasn't their idea.
So yeah, if it's so much in society's common interest to force this new format, maybe society should pay the bleepin' costs, too.
"The real questions is why regulate the spectrum at all. [. . .] arbitration process put in place to prevent infringing use. [. . . ] The problem with massive deregulation is one of cost however. The FCC (and by proxy the Federal Govt.) makes lots of money from selling access rights."
The problem is not cost (or Fed income). The problem is the deepest pockets would win the spectrum. I personally like the EIB network even if I periodically disagree with them. What scares me is if their parent company (Clear Channel Communications) had their way they'd own even more spectrum. The FCC is (barely) keeping them in check and your idea would effectively give them access to the entire US spectrum.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
What can digital tv show that analog can't? I'm sure that you can come up with all sorts of trivial features, but it doesn't solve a problem that I have. Therefore there is no reason for me to go out and piss thousands of dollars down the drain on some new boob tube.
I think it is painfully clear that I am not alone in rejecting digital tv: the market isn't buying it. Corporate welfare to prop up the TV manufacturers (by subsidizing them) is a little late and quite misguided. As long as there is a difference in price between a digital tv and an analog one, price will win every time.
GTRacer
- Whatever happened to KISS?
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
If you rent bandwidth, then its an easy thing to alternative squelch speech by making the 'rental' fee far to high, unless you are one of the big media giants..
No, not a good idea at all...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The old analog set works, and I'm not planning to replace it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
- Subsidise the TV manufacturers. Not that there are any domestic manufacturers left, due to product dumping in the 70s and 80s.
- Screw the public by overturning the Betamax ruling by technical means.
The movie industry wants to make it hard to impossible for you to copy TV shows, impossible to share recordings between different playback units in your own house (the p2p issue is baloney). Last time they tried this was with DivX, where the decryption keys to the discs were tied to your playback unit: no sharing discs between the living room and the bedroom, you pirate, you! And if your player broke, well, you get to buy all the movies in your collection all over again.From my understanding Japan has just recently (this year) made the change to digital TV. What I've read and heard though tells me consumers are not too happy with the DRM restrictions that have been put in place with the broadcast flags. Japan, none to happy with DRM The EFF has also released some docs though on how to make a homebrew digital DVR that doesn't respond to the broadcast flags and can still record the digital streams. EFF.org But so not only would we be taxed for the whole thing twice as has been previously stated, but the content that we would be forced to pay for would be moderated and controlled as well for what we can do with it. Frankly I think the whole U.S. has lost it's mind. What the government may have thought would help to ignite digital innovation, has instead helped to block end users in again and support the white collar executives instead. So remember kids when you go to vote this November, Congress has around a 90% incumbency rate...
"You know what, let's do it the libertarian way, keep the fsking government out and hey, if Clear Channel owns the entire spectrum, oh fscking well, remember he who pays the piper gets to pick the song. If clear channel can afford it, why not let them, isn't that capitalism at it's finest?"
;).
I hope you get modded up
Yes this is true, but going the libertarian way is opening Pandora's box. The thing is if you are going to do that you need to go all in (IMHO). Most Americans (/. crowd included) don't really want that. The few that do are often seen as more conservative than the Republican Party. If we (U.S.A.) were to go truly into the libertarian way of doing things I think one of two things would happen:
1) All hell would break loose as MegaCorp Inc. takes over the world like some bad 80's SF movie.
or
2) It actually works as the citizenship steps up to the plate and behave like adults (yeah right).
Heinlin got it right with Bread and Circuses. (If you don't understand the reference, go read Take Back Your Government).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I feel so sorry for the poor -- they won't be able to receive TV after the analog signals are no longer on the air. Right. Drive through the poorest part of West Virginia and count the DirecTV dishes. Better be able to count high -- real high.
Even though it is another country, I vividly remember a bus trip through the Yucatan in Mexico. Those people are poor -- their houses were often nothing more than mud and straw, and they had nothing. Nothing, that is, except for the ubiquitous satellite dish.
Most of the country already receives it's television through digital means -- be it cable or sattelite, you almost always end up going through "a TV box" to get your programs. While it is not 85% (yet) it is most. Thus, the market has already spoken for those calling for it to do so.
HDTV is making inroads, and is quickly reaching critical mass. Most all major network programming is in HDTV, and this year, finally Fox has joined the fray. Given a few years, it is reasonable to assume that HDTV will be the defacto standard. In my town (Ralwigh NC) we get 19 HD channels on cable. Four OTA. Again, the market is speaking.
The only ones left out are the Luddites who do not want to replace their gear and want to receive their signal over the air. And since they are in the minority, why are we catering to them? Why not set a date and only mandate that a D->A converter be available for sale?
Having a television is not an entitlement, after all. If everyone else can have their taxes reduced by the government gaining income from spectrum lease, the quicker the better. Then, some of the money we all now send to Washington could be spent in our communities and spur on the economy of those areas.
The "airwaves" are no more public than land is and we sell that all the time.
The government would probably get less revenue, IMO, by trying to lease radio spectrum rights rather than selling them, because companies have to make significant investments to infrastructure in order to use them. Why should a complany spend tens or hundreds of millions on cell tower transceivers when they might become useless 5 years down the road? What would a company say to their customers when their cell phones go dark because the government raised their lease payment too high?
Don't pay your property taxes and see if you really 'own' your property. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
... and closer management will mean censorship.
It's bad enough that broadcast TV is held to different standards than cable and sat stations, given that more houses have the latter than don't at this point.
But if there's regular payments to the feds for the right to broadcast TV, that's going to give the feds a stronger claim to regulate and censor content.
And who's going to pay for that extra fee? The stations? The networks? Nope, it'll get passed back to the advertisers, causing an inflationary cycle on consumer products. And those advertisers will put an even stronger grip on content, if they're paying for it.
Sure, I don't need to see Dennis Franz' @$$ ever again, but when shows like The Shield and Rescue Me have a free reign (and commercials, hmm...), and the best drama and comedy in the Emmys were on HBO, making the networks pay more will only decrease the quality of programming.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Thanks to supernova87a we all know exactly how it would be done if the government controlled all television and the laws were not written with the help of lobbyists.
Here is what a station has to do:
Build a new tower if there is no room on the existing tower (likely).
Purchase a radiating antenna for said tower
Purchase an NTSC upconverter to use during transition and to use later for news and older programs
Purchase a completely new plant with VCRs and/or hard disk arrays that will record and play back HD.
Purchase and pay to wire up that new plant as well as provide links for the old plant to the new system (for upconversion). Find a way to pay for the maintenance of all of the above as well as to send existing maintenance personnel to school to learn the new stuff.
Find some way to pay for the costs of the electricity to run the new transmitter
Please note, I am probably leaving out a whole lot of stuff here
Not to overly take the stations' side on this issue, these are pretty daunting requirements. And for a station outside of the top 100 markets, it may be really close-on to impossible. Again, during this transition, there is a chicken/egg dichotomy where very few viewers will be seeing your digital signal because they won't have purchased HD television sets yet. This means you cannot report to your advertisers that you have more viewers with HD -- you probably have fewer because the Internet, cable and satellite continue to erode your viewer base.
Small wonder the law, once feelers went out via the FCC, was heavily lobbied by all parts of the television industry. I should mention at this point that part of the reason why Congress was attracted to this law was because all television sets were being made overseas and Congress wanted there to be at least one television manufacturer located in the US. It would appear this aim was unsuccessful as multiplexo and others point out when they write here that they have televisions made in Japan or elsewhere.
I would offer the opinion that, since the death of RCA as a television company (which would be when GE swallowed them up) there has not been any possibility of any manufacture of receivers on US soil since then.
So, the laws were seriously written and rewritten by the lobbyists. Stations get the bandwidth with no requirement that they use it to broadcast in high definition. Congress, after "discovering" this fact called television network executives to Washington to enjoin them (really beg them) to broadcast in HD
Cable companies are required under law to carry local stations ("Must Carry") but, perversely, must pay for "retransmission consent," thus giving all networks a free ride on cable systems for their own cable channels (did you know that NBC owns Sci Fi, Bravo, Trio, and others as well as CNBC and part of MSNBC?).
All NYC stations will, undoubtedly, receive an extension of "Use it or Lose it" due to September 11th, 2001, which only affects towers and transmitters.
There are tons of other fun details in the law and in the FCC rulings. I guarantee you, those shows that will be seen in HD first will not be local programming. Look for news to be "upconverted" for a long time.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.