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FCC Speeds Up Digital TV Signal Deadlines
sbinning writes "The FCC, in a 4-0 vote decided that all medium-sized televisions, screens between 25 and 36 inches in diagonal, must be able to receive both digital and traditional analog signals by March 1. This is four months earlier than the commission had decreed three years ago. Now if they just mandate more intelligent programming."
that even governmental interference can't get it accepted, something is very wrong.
I still don't understand why the FCC feels like they need to interfere with the standards of television. Can someone please explain why this is a necessity?
Never happen.
I hope they also mandated them to include metadata in their broadcasts.
If you dont know digital sets are able to recieve special content like the name of the program all off the air.
This is going to hurt America's poor the most.
Well, it wasn't clear from the article but from some reading I assume they mean March 1...2006. Yeah sure, may seem obvious to some but a date with no year can mean many things.
While trying to confirm that I found an interesting page:
http://www.hdtv.net/faq.htm
Does anyone know the stats on how many stations are digital?
The Bush administration is re-organizing its cabinet departments and Powell would make a good candidate for the deputy secretary post in the Commerce Department. However, he needs the Digital TV vote to leave the agency on a good note. The FCC's new plan would set a firm deadline of 2009. Regardless of how many residents have Digital TVs, local broadcasters would be forced to switch all signals from analog to digital. To ensure that Americans would not lose their TV signals, the federal government would launch an educational campaign on the benefits -- and necessity -- of going digital. In addition, Congress would likely approve subsidies for low-income residents who can not afford to buy a new set. They could use the subsidies to either buy a new TV or get a converter box that would transfer digital signals so they could be watched on an analog set.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Does that mean it dials up some service provider and gets it through the phone line instead?
Or do you just mean on an alternate signal channel?
If you believe the 90% number for cable/satellite homes, then only 10% get their TV over the air. I get mine via DirecTV, so a switch in the local stations won't affect my home TVs at all, just the little Sony LCD one I have. Cable TV doesn't have to switch over then either.
So of the 10% getting their television over the air, I'd sure guess that a large percentage who aren't interested in cable or satellite also aren't buying new fancy TVs every couple of years. Their choices are probably going to be buy a new TV or switch to satellite or cable and continue to use their old TV.
So is it only a portion of the 10% that would be affected when the big switch happens?
Now if they just mandate more intelligent programming.
Anything but that! Programming is none of their business. You should know that by now. Especially after the "Janet" thing. Technical standards are the only thing theFCC should be messing with.
What?
If the FCC really wants me to switch to the new Digital TV, I figure I should be able to get an equivilant system for an equivilant price.
I'm willing to update if I get something better, I'm NOT going to pay a ton of money just so that I can get the same service with more pixels.
My requirements before I buy a new digital television:
If I can't get this, I don't see why I should switch. Why should I pay more for less?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Instead of trying to impose regulations, why not just let the free market decide?
Somewhere around 1500 stations (almost all stations in the bigger markets) broadcast digitally as well as analog. Here in San Francisco bay area, we get CBS,ABC,NBC,PBS,WB,UPN,FOX,UNI,SAH,TEL,PAX networks and a few independants. Few know about it though.
I also found this link at GoodGuys to be pretty informative:
http://goodguys.com/hdtv_faq.asp
Now, these are both Pro-DTV sites.
What I'm also looking for are criticisms of DTV-- other then the obvious arguments about DTV being expensive.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I have to say that I'm glad this rule isn't in effect now.
I just bought a Sanyo 24" set with a flat screen and stereo for $178. I had to buy now, because my old set died.
I would have preferred to go with HDTV, but my DVR doesn't support it, and it would have cost me at least 3x as much.
Cable will support my analog set for a long time, and by the time this set dies, the HDTVs will be super-cheap.
Oddly enough, the thing that makes me want HDTV more than anything are files from bittorrent sites that were capped from digital sources. They definitely look a lot better.
I've heard about ghosting problems.
That article does state that it's only a problem in big cities, and that better receivers are starting to help, though.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Powell's dad was calling Senators and attacking John Bolton, the administration's nominee for the US Ambassador to the UN.
Bush isn't going to be doing any favors for Michael Powell anytime soon.
>>Congress would likely approve subsidies for low-income residents who can not afford to buy a new set. They could use the subsidies to either buy a new TV or get a converter box that would transfer digital signals so they could be watched on an analog set.
Oh God, you're probably right. Just what America's poor needs -- more mind-numbing television. A quick review of over-the-air broadcasting during the hours of 9-5 (e.g. "work hours") leads me to think the poor would be better of WITHOUT television. I mean, how the hell does Judge Joe Brown, wall-to-wall adverts. for trial lawyers, that trashy dating program, soap operas, and/or the Home Shopping Network benefit anyone?
Surely I'm not the only one who believes they'd be better off if the damned box went black and they were forced to pick up a book.
One problem is that many stations are on the air, but running at low power. One local station has 4 MW ERP on their analog channel and 1 kW ERP on their digital channel.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Who wants to bet that this has been brought forward by 4 months to allow this company to grab market share?
Couldn't stand the weather
The FCC is mandating Digital TV, not High Definition TV. Sure, most providers are using the opportunity to go HD, but it isn't required.
The cost of adding an ATSC tuner to your TV won't be much once the mass market kicks in. I use a $30 Radio Shack antenna to pull in dozens of DTV programs, some in HD, most in SD, and even the SD is better than the analog version. Plus there are more programs; one local PBS station carries 4 SD programs on their DTV channel, as opposed to one on their analog channel. One HD and one SD is a more common mix.
The pc-hd3000 card I'm using was less than $200, so the cost of the tuner is obviously less than that. I expect tuner costs to drop quite a bit more. You may be able to buy a (S)DTV for your budget soon. There's no point to HD on such a small screen, though.
Focus on Digital, not High Definition. Everyone wins with digital. The higher resolution of HD is beneficial only at larger screen sizes - and it's great, there. I bought a 47" CRT RP for $800, and thought that was a reasonable value.
People *are* paying stupid amounts of money for thin screens, but that's not really what the FCC is pushing. Thin is expensive, digital is not.
I don't know. I'm worried that televisions will get too intelligent in the future. I have a recurring dream that I am watching my new LCD "Buck Rogers in the 21st Century" TV and a commercial comes on, so I get up to make a sandwich but as soon as I start to leave-- the show comes back on. Then when I sit back down to watch it the commercial comes back. Every time I try to get up this happens again. So I give in and run to the kitchen while my show is on. But it's a dream so, you know, I'm always running in slow motion. Finally I make it and I can hear my show in the other room while I spread peanut butter and jelly on two slices of bread. It sounds really good. I can tell from the laughtrack that I'm missing some really funny shit. I literally throw the knife in the sink from four feet away and run as fast as I can to the couch. My show is still on. I made it. My butt touches the couch cushion as I take a bite of my sandwich and fix my eyes on the screen... just in time to see the commercial.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
The pricing situation is a bit tricky. Right now the equipment is pricey because relatively few people want to spend money on it. As you say, existing TV is good enough for most people. (Especially since most people get their TV over cable or satellite and therefore this won't help them, but I'll get to that in a minute.)
The FCC is hoping to tell everybody, "Look, we're going to DTV, start making it," which should drop the price to the point where an adapter for your existing TV is $50. (The manufacturers keep claiming it's going to add $100 to the price of a new TV; that figure seems bogus to me. It's basically a bottom-of-the-line video card.) Remember that the FCC doesn't really give a rat's ass about the quality of your picture; they want you to switch so that they can reclaim the bandwidth.
In the end a DTV will cost more than an equivalent analog TV, because they're compressing the signal more and you need more sophisticated equipment to read it. That's what lets them reclaim the valuable bandwidth, and pass the cost on to you. The carrot is better reception, better resolution, and the 16:9 ratio, as well as a few other fancy digital features. (You'll pay more for a 16:9 TV, too.) But that's just the incentive, not the reason.
You're not paying more for less; you're paying more for more. That sucks, since you'll see the benefits only very indirectly (the new wi-fi and cell services that will gradually take over the old TV bandwidth).
But if you're unwilling to pay for it, eventually you're gonna lose. They're taking your analog signal, and you're free to stare at your old TV from 8 PM to 11:30 PM every night, but there won't be anything on except static.
Fortunately, instead of buying a new $300 TV, you'll be able to by an adapter, which right now costs $150 but will hopefully be closer to $50 by the time this is done. That's why the FCC is pushing the switch: there will be a lot of people in your position, wanting to adapt their old TV to the new signal, which should make for cheap adapters. It won't happen until the cutover gets near, in 2008.
As far as I can tell the ones who really get screwed are the cable/satellite viewers, who never really use the tuner in their TV set. And that's 90% of everybody. They use the tuner in an external box, which they usually rent from the cable/satellite company for around $5 per month or pay $100 to $200 for.
I'd like to see them start selling $200 21" TVs with no tuner in them at all, for those people. I dunno if that'll happen or not.
All of them are digital.
There are a few which have special temporary wavers to not broadcast digitally for a little bit due to economic hardship or something.
And as mentioned elsewhere, there are also some stations which are broadcasting digital signals much weaker than their analog ones since a full powered broadcast is quite expensive. This will likely change once more people have digital tuners.
Keith Irwin
only some little markets, and some few stations in larger markets, do NOT have active CPs or transmitters already. most of the delay is no-money situations, probably among tiniest markets and some educational stations, and no-tower situations, because DTV antenna farms are somewhat more elaborate (heavy and wind-loading) and almost all commercial TV towers were at design limits for hanging antennas. HDTV has been a boon to tower companies, and they have been the real limiting factor in conversions among stations that were ready to finance and build.
the likelihood is that if you live within 40 miles of a TV station, you could pick it up digital right now with an external antenna on its new frequency. call your local station of choice and ask 'em what the DTV channel is and whether they're on now.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I'm recalling the situation about the broadcast flag for digital TV and how a judge ruled that the FCC doesn't have the power to mandate such a thing because it's hardware.
Now we have the FCC mandating that TVs must provide digital reception as well as analog. What am I missing here?
I can't say I disagree with either decision, but there seems to be some level of conflict between the two activities here.
Gwah, this isn't about HDTV or 16:9 42" plasma sets. This is about a $5 digital tuner to replace the $20 one that's in the set you just bought.
If this was in effect last year, you could have saved 10-15 bucks.
And $40 bucks a month on top of that, since over the air digital will beat the crap out of analog cable, reception-wise. Hopefully the OTA market will boom after the change, and Comcast et al can go straight to hell.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
A layer for data about bluring things like nudity, colorful hand gestures out, and inserting beeps. Why shouldn't the TV know how to do that? And apply it to where, and as large as the data contained signal told it to. Then consumers could enjoy a variety of bluring or beeping techniques, or none at all, if they thought they were adult enough. The children are potentially protected from the poor choices of their inattentive parents, and the rest of us can watch Richard Prior, Cops the way they were intended.
I think this will only help make digital (and HDTV's) cheaper. Right now electronics manufactures can feel justified in charging $600 and up for a decent screen sized TV because the digital/HDTV experience is considered a "premium" viewing experience.
Once a digital tuner becomes standard and manditory, they wont be able to do this. Most people cannot justify (or even afford in most cases) these prices for TV sets. The NBC/Universals and Viacoms of the world will be leaning hard on TV makers to lower prices closer to what people are traditionally paying for analog sets now. They don't lose viewers and revenue from the equipment being priced out of Joe Wage-Worker's reach.
As long as they're upping the deadlines for TVs to support digital broadcasts, they should also be putting regulatory pressure on broadcasters and content makers to provide digital HD content, even if there's no mandated DRM yet to "protect" said content from evil people like us who want to commit the heinous crimes of skipping commercials and time/space/format-shifting the shows we watch.
[Better formatting]
h icalissues/economichistory/mysteries.shtml
No, World War 2 helped end that cycle early, NOT FDR. Cycles are part of nature, they will happen one way or another. This one was just exacerbated by the relatively recently formed Fed Reserve and their decision to shrink the money supply so drastically.
http://www.amatecon.com/gd/gdoverview.html
"What caused the Great Depression? To get a handle on that, it's necessary to look at previous depressions and compare. The Great Depression was by no means the first depression this country ever had, but it was clearly the worst. What made it different than the rest? At the time of the Great Depression, government intervention in the economy was higher than it had ever been and a special government agency had been set up specifically to prevent depressions and their associated problems, such as bank panics."
http://www.libertyhaven.com/theoreticalorphilosop
"Many free-market economists had attempted to answer the first question, including Benjamin M. Anderson and Murray N. Rothbard,2 but none had the impact equal to Milton Friedman's empirical studies on money in the early 1960s. His was the first effective effort to destroy the argument that the Great Depression was the handiwork of an inherently unstable capitalistic system. Friedman (and his co-author, Anna J. Schwartz) demonstrated forcefully that it was not free enterprise, but rather government - specifically the Federal Reserve System - that caused the Great Depression."
Your belief that the GD was caused by a Free Market has been misproven many times. It's still a common fallacy, but it's not true. But, I find it hard to believe that anyone can actually think that FDR saved us from it. He didn't. HITLER and HIROHITO brought us out of that slump.
http://www.policyreview.org/aug01/roberts.html
"A country that doesn't understand its own history is not well equipped to deal with its future. The Great Depression was not a failure of the old order. It was the failure of the new order that had just begun.
The Federal Reserve is the most powerful institution of a new order that believed in the efficacy of government and its ability to do good. The same Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression when its wise men made a series of cumulative mistakes that contracted the money supply by one-third and wiped out purchasing power in an unprecedented fashion."
What I'm also looking for are criticisms of DTV...
How about all that horrible pixelation in low contrast areas of the screen because of the extreme compression being used? I'm not the least bit impressed with digital or DVDs. My old 12 inch video disks looked just as good...better to me. If you want real quality, you need a 1 inch VTR with component video out. It still makes the best picture I've seen. And it's analog. So searching rapidly through the tape is easy. Besides, DTV is expensive..., but then, so is the 1 inch. I do like the idea of other data bieng put into the signal. We were promised that with CDs, but so far hardly anybody uses it.
What?
I've thought all along that the switch to all digital broadcasts is a bad idea.
What is the main reason that people in the US watch broadcast TV? Because they can't afford cable or satellite.
After the switch people are going to be unable to get any television at all unless they fork over hundreds of dollars for a new digital set.
The "Chuck and Di TV" has got yours beat. My wife and I got it shortly after we got married, and one of the first things we watched on it was Chuck and Di's wedding.
More recently, the keypad didn't work, so we tuned it through the VCR. Besides, it didn't do too well with cable channels. The volume contro was a bit fritzed, as were the color controls. But it still worked. We'd been looking on and off for a while, kind of hoping to get a flat panel of one sort or another. But priorties being what they are, we decided to set our sights lower, and got a 24" flatscreen CRT. We're quite happy with it.
One of the last things we watched on the old TV was Chuck and Camilla's wedding. We figured it was a good bookend to the old workhorse. Nearly 23 years, and it still (mostly) worked.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Bu$Hilter Chimpy McHaliburten is who I blame, personally.
But we do have an option, since so far the FCC hasn't ruled that every home is required to have a TV.
What the fuck is this supposed to mean? Stupid fucking morons.
What we really need is more intelligent viewers.
Yeah, I know I shouldn't reply to myself.
I'm well aware there will be cheaper converter boxes available for the owners of old analog sets. But many people, me included, are turned off (pun not intended) by having to deal with a separate tuner and would rather have a set that can recieve such programming natively. This is one thing that stops some people from using digital cable service as it exists today on their analog sets (I think some of these people have bad memories of analog converters for their non-cable ready TV's in the 80's).
The FCC mandated changeover to all digital broadcasting and the inclusion of digital tuners in all TV's (along with the inevitable price adjustments to HDTV sets I believe will come) is what keeps me from replacing my current 4:3 analog set. Even though I'd like to have component inputs right now for my DVD player (all I have on my current set is a single coax input).
There's not too much to criticize. Everyone knows it's an inevitable step in the right direction.
You can complain about artifacts of digital video, but it's still better than the artifacts of analog broadcast. You can complain about the reduced broadcast range. You can complain that they didn't go further, making 1080 progressive. You can complain that they didn't choose a better codec, such as MPEG-4, VP3, VP6, wavelet-based codec, etc. You could say they dedicated too much of the bandwidth to audio (or you could say too little if you're an insane audiophile).
What else is there to criticize?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well, guess what ? I ALREADY have a billion channels TODAY, on DEMAND. Its called the internet. Yeah Yeah, I cannot stream video but still I do have access to billion channels of _information_
I am already overloaded with too much JUNK on TV. Uptil 3 months ago I had extended basic (50? channels), and I had a hard time finding anything decent. Now I am back to my 12-channels of basic TV.
This whole digital TV thing seems to be a massive conspiracy on part of the entertainment / cable industry to screw you out of another $80 per month. Time to say NO! to your Cable Company.
Denial is not a river in Egypt
At least here in the NYC metro area, no cable provider offers unencrypted digital TV. The relevant standard is DVB over ASI, except they all wrap it in DVB-CA, "CA" for "conditional access". The condition is that you use their box, on their terms, which if you read your service agreement says can change at any time without notice. We'll have our DTV real soon now, but wait 'till you see how fair-use looks ;)
.. when they did this.
They regulated change to digital but entrenched interests in existing TV got ears of politicians so no effective service or anything new could make it to the digital channel (restrictions on news, sport etc..)
So please don't think move to "digital" == "better" when you take commercial interests and politics into account.
Alex.
I know you're kidding, but are you really sure you want THIS administration to decide what constitutes "intelligent" programming?
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Can you point to a model? I wasn't aware that there ever was a 1" that recorded component video. Are you sure you aren't talking about D1 or Betacam?
Sony did come out with a 1" digital HD (native 1080p, uncompressed) recorder in the early 90's, but it was more of a test piece, not so much a production unit. However, that is not the same as the analog 1" Type C machines (omega wrap) that Ampex introduced in the 80's. It used a D1 type component output at a much higher data rate (still in use today). Those old 1" machines were in use until Sony finally crushed them with the 1/2" Betacam SP format, driving the final nail into Ampex, a once-great american company.
An interesting side note, one of the last places to see a 1" tape in use was on remote trucks at football games, because it is very easy to recue and run them in slow motion. The tape operator could just lean on the tape reel flange and slow down the playback.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Ghosting? Multipath with DTV results in intermittant loss of signal. With DTV, either you get a perfect picture, or you don't get a picture at all. Oh sure, on rare occasions you may see macroblocks, or green or puce noise, but those errors are usually a prelude to total signal loss.
They already do. It's part of the Closed Captioning space known as XDS (extended data services). Mostly it's used to set the clock in your VCR.
However, if your TV supports it (on some TV's it can be found near the Closed Caption menus), it will show you such information as what is currently being shown, and depending on the television, the genre and run time of the current broadcast.
The FCC is trying to force a transition to digital. This is fine. What's dumb is the way it is doing it. It ought to simply raise fines for transmitting in analog. When the fines are $100/month, everyone will still do it. As they spike to $1 billion/month, no one will do it. In between, stations will slowly drop off. If this is done gradually, stations will fade off of analog (with each passing station, fewer people divide the market, so profits for the remaining guys momentarily go up). By the time the last analog station is gone, no one will notice or care.
A TV in every home.
or you could use antennaweb
But didn't the courts just get through telling the FCC that they had no power to create regulations regarding receivers?
Did I misunderstand the ruling regarding the broadcast flag, or is the FCC ignoring the meaning of it?
Digital artifacts are more noticeable than some fuzziness (that our eyes are used to in the natural world) and the "cliff effect" (you either have a picture or no picture at all) is worse than a slightly staticky picure you can still watch.
Broadcasters can keep turning up the compression (and the quality down) to fit more channels in the same bandwidth. See what's happening with satellite radio quality (64 Kbps or less now?).
The US ATSC modulation makes portiable televisons difficult to implement. Say goodbye to watching battery powered $40 handheld or mobile home/car TVs.
The tribe has spoken -- the going price for a basic 32" TV in America is $200, and if the FCC says that'll have to include an ATSC tuner, the TV makers will have to keep the price more or less the same or they'll soon be joining the poor.
First off, I'm old and I still watch free over the air (OTA) television because I'm also cheap.
When I was a kid, televisions had channels 2-13 only. This is the VHF band. When UHF was introduced, you could purchase an inexpensive converter box that would receive the new-fangled UHF signal and convert it to an unused VHF channel that your old set could display.
Any realistic near tern transition to digital only would need to have cheap, (less than $100), widely available converter boxes to receive the new-new-fangled DIGITAL signal and convert it to analog for old sets. Yes there are specialty suppliers, but walk into any major store that sells TVs and try to find a digital converter!
I know such devices can be mass produced cheaply. I often watch or record HDTV from OTA broadcasts with a $170 card plugged into my Linux box. (See pcHDTV). A higher volume production and a few more control parts should be able to make a $100 converter box.
Yes I know you won't get full resolution etc. with conversion, but it preserves current capability while over time sets are replaced, just like with the introduction of UHF.
In my area, all but one, (UPN), of the OTA channels is available in digital. In fact some even broadcast several simultaneous subchannels. Unfortunately the televison notes in the newspaper don't say squat about the digital channels.
The free market is still free. However the broadcast television market isn't a free market, and never has been.
Don't like this? Okay, then go actually buy from the free market. It still exists, you know, if you actually want to make use of it instead of just complaining that it's not the only option. Buy a computer monitor and a digital cable subscription and some funny cables and congratulations, you now have functional television service transmitted over privately held resources and without mean old Mr. Government getting involved at all.
So long. Y'know. At least as long as you can put up with the electronics safety regulations governing the monitor, and the fact that the government is, in fact, a wholly owned subsidiary of the cable companies.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I would give most anything for a working media player for OS X that plays oggs, flacs, and maybe shns.
Merry Christmas. Seen on HydrogenAudio -- the owner of that forum, Dibrom, is also looking at writing his own Mac player.
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Criticism you seek, and shall find.
Get to the basics. Digital IS analog. No matter how you try to look at it, that pulse of energy at every diode, wire, processor, anything, is an analog wave. Even "digital" information transferred across a network wire, it's still analog pulses of electricity. Fiber optic? Analog light wave. Digital is a pure and simple bullshit term.
First bad thign about "digital" in the case of satellites, you get the wrong cloud overhead, you either get blocky pictures, or no picture at all. In teh case of digital cable, it's like they're trying to upsample something, and doing a poor job.
Digital broadcast over airwaves? Okay, that's just another ANALOG signal. Why not just make analog signals that carry the high-definition information, and then make an analog TV that can deal with that information and display it correctly??
Much goes for the same argument against Analog (CRT) and Digtal (LCD/Plasma) Hate to say it, but while a LCD/Plasma is nice, the refresh rates are still too slow, dealing with resistance, etc over those wires. CRT tubes, vacuum. Once that signal hits the tube, it's practically an instant transmission, and you'll get faster refresh rates without the blurriness or ghosting effect of Digital. Again, analog > Digital.
I coudl go on, but I'm not going to pull out my Texas Instruments books and other stuff to make a longer list.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You can complain about artifacts of digital video, but it's still better than the artifacts of analog broadcast.
it CAN be better, but isnt always.
because the bottom line is profit, cable companys (at least mine) think that more channels is better, so they compress the hell out of them to fit in more. thus achieving a worse than analog picture.
Right, because I want hard core porn during childrens shows, so the stations gets better ratings.
Like this? (Not safe for work!)
TV manufacturers define the "diagonal inch" as 7 centimeters.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The FCC is endangering the lives of midwesterners with this move. I cry "Terrism!"
Interesting. The new digital tuners all got designed (and built) with the Bclast flag functionality. Then the FCC gets shot down on mandating it...now they want to move the implementation timetable up.
Effectively removing any redesign or rebuild time that the manufacturers would have had to change things around.
I think he's referring to the 4-0 vote as opposed to maybe a 32-0 vote.
Yes, that's what I meant. Not real ghosting, although that's what it would be on an analog TV (although in this case it might merely be blurring, depending on the different lengths of the signal paths), but complete picture loss due to multipath. Sorry.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
I live in Loveland.
I clicked the link.
The site can't spell the name of the city correctly.
Furthermore, they may be good at web development, but they suck at grammar.
There's a rediculous amount of high-quality intelligent television programming on network TV. Include the cable channels and you've got even more. 24, Lost, Boston Legal, Veronica Mars, Survivor, Amazing Race for starters. There's lots more that doesn't interest me but is still nonetheless good.
You really do have to *not* be watching any TV in order to seriously claim "there's nothing good on TV". I'm not sure we've ever had this much high-quality stuff on the air.
Now if they just mandate more intelligent programming
Perhaps it would be better if they took their noses out of programming and 'moral standards' and concentrated on their real job: technical standards...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
by thebatlab (468898) on Thursday June 09, @07:43PM (#12775801)
Yeah sure, may seem obvious to some but a date with no year can mean many things.
Slashdot: eliminating context since... uh... I'll get back to you on that one.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
I work for a local analog station, we have no clue when were going to go 100% digital.
We do have a small DTV transmitter, it only covers about five miles....
"Soon will never come for the analog cut off date."
That's what they want us to think around here.
Expect your local stations to evaporate soon...
If I were to make same stupid comment like that against some bleeding-heart liberal politician (say, someone from the socialist paradise of France...) I'd be marked as a troll.
But I have to hand it to Slashdot. Unlike other left-leaning media sources Slashdot doesn't even attempt to hide their agenda (this can be seen not just here in the comments section but at the end of most news stories as well).
Instead of pussy footing around with stuff like... we'll make a decission when the digital uptake has reached 80%.
Come on UK govm't (or whatever the quango is thats runnning this). make a descission and force all the manufacturers to comply...you're quick enough to try and force ID cards on us...
Didn't we just read some news about a decision stating that the FCC doesn't have the power to make arbitrary rules about how electronics are to be manufactured, specifically that the broadcast flag can't be required by the FCC? Yet they can mandate that TVs must be able to receive certain types of signals?
What am I missing here?
Re: Granted, it's $329 instead of $250, but it's also 27" instead of 21". Don't forget to factor inflation.
I was checking last week and I could now get a 20" TV with a built-in DVD player for less than the 14" TV I bought 4 years ago.
Mr Enron Haliburton should have to pay less for the TV you suggest, not more.
Its interesting how the government is so strict on bringing Digital TV to the mass market, pushing TV makers kicking and screaming. But for something important like alternative fuels, ethanol, anything actually is important, the governmentjust sits idly by, letting the industry keep pushing this Taliban-Supporting Gasoline Infrastructure until the very last oil well dries up.
Why push deadlines?
Because the FCC WILL be mandating that all 'non-broadcast' distribution be in 'analog' format!
Seriously, I gurandamntee that there will be a move on the part of 'bought and paid for FCC' to restrict competition by non-broadcast 'distributed distribution' via the internet or broadband wireless cooperatives. Imagine a network of 100mbps wireless distibution using cheap OTC hardware. It's a realistic scenario in NYC. The talent, energy, and audience are all there and to me, it's a surprise that it hasn't happend yet!
Whqat justification will they use? Why 'the poor' and 'homeland security' of course. Any distribution mechanism that threatens broadcast is a danger on both fronts. "Why just look at all the money the TeVee folks have invested in digital broadcast. If they go out of business, poor folks won't be able to watch homeland security TASERing domestic terrorists and might get the idea that they can join the revolution!"
Eh, it's still better than my last wife. Let's face it, TV:
- Gives you sex (porn)
- Takes care of your kids (cartoons and Seasame Street)
- Takes care of you when you're sick (look in any hospital room)
Of course, it also bitches at you (Fox News, Crossfire, etc.). But, unlike my last wife, it also has an off switch.-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The deadline for all stations to have a DTV signal on the air has passed. Almost all US television stations have a DTV signal on air now, although not all have maximized their DTV signal power.
I'm just curious how many people, when their television goes black, will realize they didn't watch it much anymore anyway and not replace it.
It's worth rereading the Onion article: "Television ends."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/06/09/AR2005060902283.html
...
Public Broadcasting Targeted By House
Panel Seeks to End CPB's Funding Within 2 Years
A House subcommittee voted yesterday to sharply reduce the federal government's financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children's educational programs as "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," "Arthur" and "Postcards From Buster."
In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Closed caption boxes have been available since the 1970's. My parents, who are deaf, bought one of the first ones. The original ones were the size of a VCR.
As another poster noted, closed caption decoders were not mandated until 1993.
we're talking small business owners growing themselves into the upper class, just like you can do.
No, HE can't. He's too much of a whiny bitch.
By your reasoning, an AM signal has different channel properties than an FM signal, but why bother making that distinction since analog is obviously still analog. Never mind that AM is affected more by atmospheric noise, and that FM SNR can be increased more easily by increasing bandwidth. They're both analog, so who cares? Or maybe you should learn some about communication theory before you start spouting off.
Oh, and CRT vs. LCD? That "refresh rate" isn't due to wire resistance vs. vacuum. LCD's don't need to be refreshed, each pixel is always on or always off. Each pixel has a transistor controlling it (that's what the "TFT" means... Thin Film Transistor). These transistors can only switch states so fast, due to a parasitic capacitance between the gate and the drain of each transistor. Make a faster-switching transistor, and you get less ghosting. So you're comparing apples to oranges.
So, the question I have is, are you a troll, or just spouting off because you don't know any better?
Hey, how'd you know I was lookin' at you if you weren't lookin' at me?
I bought the new digital-capable TV, check. I'm now getting both analog and digital versions of channels for the stations already broadcasting in digital (a majority of the 20+ broadcast channels I pick up, actually) While the digital channels look really nice, and the HDTV broadcasts even nicer, there is a basic problem. The weaker of these channels routinely break up, pixelate, or freeze and are totally unwatchable in digital, where in analog, they are a little snowy, but perfectly OK to watch. In bad weather, some channels may have a little snow or ghost in analog, but the digital signal breaks up in a hurry.
When this switchover happens, I'll go from getting like 20 channels to maybe 2, and those 2 will not be very reliable.
So people who still rely on broadcast TV are going to have a tough time with this I suspect, even if they can get a cheap digital TV.
The potential is huge, but the broadcasters don't seem to get it. They're still sending a single subchannel at full bandwidth to people who have wide screens but can't display all the pixels. More content - even just weather and channel guides would be more valuable to most.
Think: Encrypted signals descrambled for more pay-on-request services, anti-copying bits, and much, much more.
I think one of the reasons they may be pushing digital sooner, is because going digital offers easier deployment of several copy protections. But then again the rule of thumb will continue to apply to copy protections on digital material: "If someone can watch it ,hear it or recieve it, it can be copied". It just becomes more and more of a challenge, and might request analog methods to so.
Just some random thoughts ^^
They can still recieve free digital broadcasts using the same antenna (actually, a much smaller and lower cost antenna being UHF), however they will now recieve a picture of superior quality to even cable.
My latest set came with a digital ATSC tuner, which I initially ignored by simply plugging the existing Time Warner cable service into the RF jack.
Months later, our of pure curiousity, I stuck a short piece of wire into the RF jack and commanded the TV to "find channels". Amazing! The smeary analog local stations being resent via Time Warner's coax were replaced by artifact free perfect video. Imagine being able to read the fine print from a loan or car commercial as if it were on a computer monitor. In effect, it now is.
Then there are the new subchannels. Five PBS, local radar, sports. When Duke and Carolina were in the playoffs simultaneously, the local CBS affiliate simply carried the conflicting games on subchannels.
For the cost of forking over the equivalent cost of a three or four months of Time Warner subscription for a digital ATSC tuner, they'll have thirty or so digitial perfect channels, free forever.
Sony BVH-2000. Best 1 inch ever. Better than Ampex. Though I'll admit the vipers were easy to fix. Kept some running until 2001. If you want auto-thread, get a 3000.
The tape operator could just lean on the tape reel flange and slow down the playback.
Might work with the Ampex, but the Sony would just shut down if the tension got too high or low. I found a better way for me was to simply pause the machine, spin one reel like a record as fast or as slow as you want, and the machine would keep tension on the tape and play a perfect picture. Theough beta took over for all the obvious reasons, picture quality will never be one of them. The 1 inch still looks better. All this being analog. No "D" nothing. The last equipment I saw was some Sony Beta "hybrid" thing that could do both analog and digital. I thought editing with digital was a pain. With analog, shuttling through hours of video was just easier to "decypher" as it was passing along. And audio cues were easier to pick out.
What?
You people (and the parent) are confusing "off" and "from". (To AC: You get a book from the shelf.) The sentence in the parent post should have been "If you don't know, digital sets are able to recieve special content, like the name of the program, all from the airwaves.". (Note the added apostrophe and commas, which also help to correct and clarify the meaning of the sentence.) Using "from" would have been much clearer, and could have prevented this terrible war.
PS. The common mis-use of "off" to mean "from" is usually expressed as "off of". So you get a book off of the shelf, or you get the info off of the airwaves. This is still incorrect, but slightly clearer. Had mboverload used "off of" instead of "off" (still incorrect, but less so), tragedy could have been averted, and many lives might have been saved. Alas, alas, we shall never know.
Plus, you can use error correction schemes to make up for those times when too much noise gives a false high or a false low. As long as you don't get too many of those, you end up being able to reconstruct the original signal at the other end (well, within the limits of sampling theory).
If you take any type of signal, and convert it, inherently, there is loss. (Harcourt-Brace Jovanovich - Labs and Errata for Principles of Electronics, Analog and Digital - 1987) Converting from one to another, regardless (this is proven in recording at concert halls, theaters [when people rip by using a camcorder, translating an analog light waveform to a digital electrical signal] and much, much more,) there will always be a loss. There is no way around it unless we come up with a brand new way of conversion.
By your reasoning, an AM signal has different channel properties than an FM signal
The only difference is one is picked up according to the amplitude of the analog wave, the other tunes to the frequency shift of the analog wave. Oh, and one can carry stereo where the other can carry monoaural. I know plenty about communications theory, this is why I run a shortwave broadcast that people in China can pick up easily, without too much of a problem from my higher altitude, being on the bluffs that Memphis is built upon. (You know, being higher up allows the signal to be picked up with less interference than when it's closer to ground level, etc.)
That "refresh rate" isn't due to wire resistance vs. vacuum........
These transistors can only switch states so fast, due to a parasitic capacitance.....
Resistance and capacitance are very closely related. (Now I've got my father, who was one of the lead engineers at TI, helping me out with this one, because this is an admitted area I'm a bit fuzzy on.) According to him, The reasons that LCD screens are slower, is because not only do the gates cause a problem, but also the wiring used to trigger the on/off of a TFT pixel. The way around this is simple (and we're both surprised that it hasn't been done yet) it to make colored phosphor pixels, and have electricity cause them to have the on/off state. (After all, an electron beam is pretty much electricity) by using this method, there's a chance that LCD screens could become faster, much more responsive, and as an added bonus, eliminate the need for backlighting, (since phosphors, when excited, produce their own light) making the screens that much lighter and thinner, plus increase color gamut and contrast ratio. (This is, in basic principle, the same as the OLED technology being worked/improved upon today.)
So, the question I have is, are you a troll, or just spouting off because you don't know any better?
If I were a troll, you'd tend to think that I'd respond much less rationally to your response and resort to childish words. I'm here to provoke rational thought, discussions, and lay out theories for others to discuss. This is, after all, a board for debate and discussion. I think that's enough of an answer to your question.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
... on my TVs from the 70s and 80s, I won't give a crap. That's all TV is good for anymore anyway... and for playing VHS movies which are cheap to get. Thank you everyone who jumps on the "latest & greatest" so that prices drop on things that are still perfectly usable. :) :)
That is an entirely different situation. First of all, that involves converting from analog, to digital, then back to analog, whereas HDTV is digital all the way.
In addition, cable TV and OTA broadcast TV is very different. With cable, you don't get the signal loss, serious ghosting, interference, etc, that you get from OTA TV.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
1) worthwhile
2) attract viewers
3) Low bandwidth and
4) free once they set something up to pull the data periodically from the national weather service.
And yeah, it would beat TWC for usefullness.
All television sets sold in the United States in the last few years have a V-chip, which can be set to block unrated programming and programming rated as not intended for children. This tool allows parents to prevent their TV sets from showing porn to all but the most determined kids, those who have patience to sit for hours and brute-force all 10,000 combinations to the V-chip.
Oh joy. KET decreases picture quality to provide datacasting services the public isn't allowed to access. To all those Kentucky government types, I say: "Get your own Internet Service Providers, you cheapskates."
At least with educational programming, there's the possibility of utility. For encrypted data services, there's none. None at all.
I have MacOSX boxes at home. If I was going to get another computer, it might run *BSD, or Linus. Not a virus laden piece of
HDTV is successful because people like high resolution pictures and Dolby Digital 5.1. I don't have a big screen TV (just a small HDTV), but I know quite a few people who do. And they tell me that 525 line NTSC and 480i SDTV looks quite crude on their expensive TVs. Currently, the population of HDTV owners is dominated by those who value superior video and audio above multicasting. It may seem shallow to you, but dramas, science documentaries, and movies are all enhanced by picture detail that exceeds DVD. The engineers know this, and starve the secondary channels for bits.
If you take any type of signal, and convert it, inherently, there is loss.
Right, that's why I mentioned sampling theory. Look up Nyquist criteria if you want more information.
Oh, and one can carry stereo where the other can carry monoaural.
Missed my point entirely. You stated that the transmission over the airwaves or down the wires/fiber is fundamentally analog. But to transmit any type of data, you have to come up with an encoding scheme. There are many many ways to do this, but they can basically be divided into two basic methods of encoding: analog and digital. The methods used for digitally encoding data tend to be less succeptable to noise, and are also able to use error correction methods to recover from large amounts of noise. To simply claim that digital is really just "... a pure and simple bullshit term." is just sweeping a lot of fundamental differences aside. If you don't catch what I'm trying to point out here, I don't know how to make it any more plain.
Oh, and just because commercial AM (DSB-LC, IIRC) and your shortwave radio (using what, supressed sideband?) don't do it doesn't mean you can't do stereo over AM: you can use independent sidebands, or frequency division multiplexing. QAM for AM is actually pretty close to how they do stereo-FM. You need something a little more complex than a superheterodyning envelope detector, but I can be done.
Resistance and capacitance are very closely related.
Sure, capacitance is closely related to resistance (resistance is the real component and capacitance/inductance is the imaginary, or reactive, component of a complex-valued impedance, anyone who takes a first course in circuits can tell you that). But the funamental point here can be seen in ohm's law for capacitors: i=C*dv/dt (again, introductory level circuits). So, because of the dv/dt term, you can't have instantaneous change in a capacitor. I don't really get your point about the wiring... LCD's work by changing the state of a capacitor, and for the short amount of wiring involved, I don't imagine there is any propogation delay. What am I missing in your explanation?
As for the work-around you suggest, check out Field Emission Displays, or Motorola's experimental Nano Emissive Display (which was mentioned on a slashdot article a few weeks back). I've heard it described as an array of pixels, similar to LCD, but with each pixel basically its own miniature CRT. Might result in a display that gets the best of both the LCD and CRT technologies.
Hey, how'd you know I was lookin' at you if you weren't lookin' at me?
the V-Chip is mandated for TVs, but not for VCRs, which can be used to easily get around the restrictions.
Sure, it'd be recorded, but would kids be able to watch the tape on a TV that you own? Remember that the rating signal is hidden in vertical blanking, just like closed captions, and a TV can pick up and enforce the rating signal recorded on the tape. Or does VHS itself distort V-chip rating signals beyond recognition? In that case, the block on unrated programming would pick it up, such that you have to put in the code to watch a tape.
Sure, V-chip doesn't work for live mishaps such as the infamous wardrobe malfunction, but one tit for one second is hardly hardcore pornography.
It's not just cable. Most DVDs, besides sticking or skipping more oftem than a scratched record, have horrible video also. Working this stuff over the last 15 years has just made me hyper-critical. Now I see every flash frame and phase change in a bad edit. I suppose this is what makes $80 DVD players possible. Doesn't matter to me anynore. I quit buying with the demise of the 12 inch video disk, and besides, I don't trust the damn things to last more than 15 years...tops. Hell, I can be happy with a 5 inch black 'n white, so this whole picture quality thing really doesn't matter that much. In fact, with this DTV stuff, will I still be able to buy a 5 inch black 'n white for 60 bucks? Probably, but there won't be a signal for me to see.
What?
The real win with digital encoding (well, any well-designed digital encoding, anyway) is that it allows you to build in error correction, which gives you really great noise tolerance. Analog is simply that: analog. You get what you get. Sure, there are noise-reduction algorithms you can use, but those are reactive: you have a crap signal and you try to make it better. Digital is the opposite: you build in noise-resistant and -correcting features from the start, and use them if necessary. You sound well-informed about this sort of stuff, so I'm sure I don't need to tell you that a rather weak and noisy digial signal can often be almost perfectly reconstructed. With analog you just get nasty snow and visual artifacts.
So sure, it's all analog in the end, but digital encoding is the way to go when you can't control the environment.
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
As soon as congress sets a mandatory date for a switch to digital (and thus killing analog), the people who make Digital/Analog converters will know when the market will be in place. They then plan on having $50-$80 converters en mass on the market by that date. Until they have a firm date, they don't know when there will be a market for the D/A converters (as people can still tune to the analog).
t vtechnology.com+congress+box&btnG=Search
You won't need a "free converter" if the manufacturers would integrate the receivers into the TVs and that's exactly what the FCC is mandating. I never did understand why companies don't provide the product people want - half the people with "wide screen" think they're getting HDTV. Oh that's why - they can sell a cheaper product and people will *think* it's what they want.
Bundling a DTV reciever into any tv currently ups the price by at least $100. So take to HDTVs that are identical in any way excpet one doesn't have hte built in reciever. The one with the reciever will cost at least $100 more. There are reasons to not have the converter in the TV.
A) You use cable/satelite/other only and no OTA (Over the Air)
B) The external recievers you can buy are usually superior to the ones that come bundled in the TVs (better at handling multipat/impulse noise/decoding)
As for broadcaster take on this? Most of them would love to be able to shut down the analog transmitter. It costs them well over $10K a month to power a single transmitter. Then there are other equipment issues and the infrastructure necessary to support it. One station even requested it be able to hand over it's analog channel early and was denide by the FCC (crazy world we live in).
Read TV Technolgy. It covers a lot of these issues.
Here's one article on the D/A boxes
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=+site%3A
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
One thing is the enforcement of protection,
but on another side the equipment to create digital programs is cheaper because for analog video you need stuff like Sony Betacam decks and stuff like that.. NTSC signal is pretty costly.. Also I assume more information can be described on a HDTV, for example, tornado watches.. Another thing is public TV is dying away..
Just say no to license servers!!
PLUS they can sell those frequencies for BIG BUCKS!!!
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
Am I right then that you end up passing by 11-1 on your way to check the weather? Do you have a better idea whats on NBC because of this even if you don't like the programs?
If you think the switch to digital will improve your over the air tv you are mistaken.
Here is why.
Signal range for HDTV is very limited unlike analog TV. The result is that if you do not have a 90% perfect analog signal do not expect to be able to receive digital because it requires a noise free signal to work.
To make this worse most all digital channels will be on UHF not VHF like they use to be. UHF from ch 14 up has a much more limited range in areas with tall buildings and trees.
The results we are seeing in Louisiana is that 90% of the old analog viewers will not be able to receive the digital service. Making matters worse signal maps created by the NAB are wrong and were done with a 30 or 40 ft tower and a huge $200 antenna. They need to be redone with a rooftop antenna using a antenna under $80 which is what most people will be using.
In most cities here the analog VHF signal could go 150 to 200 miles but the HDTV digital signal is lucky to go 10 to 20 miles.
The only channel that has almost as large a coverage area as it used to is ch 8 Monroe but they received permission to transmit HDTV on ch 7 VHF.
As far as what I have seen HDTV will be a falure unless HDTV is moved to VHF on ch 2-13.
Just wait until analog is turned off and everyone tries to get local channels. You are going to hear a lot of people yelling. None of these expensive TVs sold in rual areas will ever be able to receive HDTV and with analog gone they will get no over the air TV.
Will you be able to get HDTV? Check www.antennaweb.org if they show anything above a green antenna for your HDTV channel do not expect to receive it.