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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."
This is going to hurt America's poor the most.
They have to do something to justify their employment.
Sick of stupidity? http://www.patentlystupid.com
Sounds like a good idea to me.
Well, we wouldn't have UHF stations (maybe that's good, maybe not) or closed-captioning (which I use a lot, even thought I'm not deaf) unless their inclusion in new TVs hadn't been mandated.
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
Money.
They want to sell the signals that are currently being used for broadcasting and they are going to do so in the name of digital progress.
Now if you don't mind I have about 300 shows to watch right now.
RTFA again for the best results.
Because the TV stations want the FCC, in fact they demand it. They demand that you and I don't broadcast on their frequency. They want the FCC to FORCE us not to.
In exchange for FORCING the public into following the TV broadcaster's desires the FCC also FORCES the broadcasters to follow our collective desires...
Or did you think it was a lucky coincidence that only one person broadcasts on a TV frequency at a time in any given area?
But...but..the free...free market...it...it...should be...free?
Screw it, I'm going to Starbucks to have a triple-latte and complain about the deforestation. That's where they like...chop down trees for no reason...right?
Because sometimes the free market doesn't work speedily in the interests of the consumer and common good, you asshat. This is why there are pollution regulations, automobile crash tests, minimum wages, and class-action lawsuits.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
The FCC is the Federal Communications Commission. They are in charge of _everything_ that passes over the air waves. The advent of digital television will clear up many of the airwave bands.
Its progress, you've got to have progress!
In addition, Congress would likely approve subsidies for low-income residents who can not afford to buy a new set.
I hope to goodness you're kidding. How about some subsidies for education or housing instead?
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.
Quick history. When the analog space is freed and available from the conversion to digital, that space will then be auctioned off, most likely to closed bid communications companies.
The gov is fine with this since the money is earmarked to pay off the deficit. In reality, buying an HDTV has the positive side effect of lowering the national debt. It's a very good plan, if you don't mind being used for high level money making.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
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.
> 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
Am I the only one who is a little disturbed by seemingly classist statements like that above? I'm reading the above as "the poor are too lazy!" They should open a book and get real jobs!
Sure there are lazy poor people. There are also lazy middle class people and lazy rich people, too. Being poor doesn't mean someone is lazy. Sometimes it's just nearly impossible for someone to get out of poverty on the jobs available. The book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America apparently does a pretty good job of illustrating this (although I haven't had time to read it yet!)
Sometimes if you're having to work two jobs the only thing you want to do when you get home is numb out in front of the TV. It would be a hell of a lot better if that weren't true, but we don't live in a perfect world.
Aside from that, one reason why television is important is to alert citizens about storms and whatnot. So it is up to the government to either keep the standard the same or providing a method for all citizens to have a way to decode public broadcasts.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Does this remind anyone of the description Joel gives of his dream in the beginning of Risky Business? Except a much less interesting version that doesn't involve a girl in a shower.
We already have plenty of education subsidies.
Housing subsidies are very dangerous because they create dependencies. They are also very expensive because they have to be continued year after year, potentially forever. The Section 8 rent subsidy programme is a good example of this. Worse, it bids up the price of housing for everyone else, which is just horrible.
However, the supply of TVs is effectively unlimited, so subsidies for TVs are likely to do very little harm other than their cost. A $200 subsidy for a digital TV is less than the average Section 8 subsidy for one month. So subsidies for digital TV do not even compete with those for housing or even education.
I don't support any subsidies, personally, but the digital TV idea is less harmful than most.
D
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?
What we really need is more intelligent viewers.
Until that time, however, I'm standing with all the people who can't afford a new TV or converter. The primary consumers of normal rf-based (non-satellite, non-cable) broadcasts are precicely the people that can't afford this change. It's a decidedly stupid idea.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
That's not a reasonable comparison. Adding UHF stations and closed-captioning to broadcasts did not cause existing televisions to cease to be useful. This change makes every single analog television completely worthless without a set-top box, and (as I just wrote elsewhere), the people who are watching TV via rabbit-ears are the ones with the least dough to spend on more equipment.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
So, the deal is that digital TV stations use 1/5th the bandwidth of conventional analog stations. The space used by VHF (and UHF, to a lesser extent) is ideal for emergency personnel b/c those frequencies penetrate better through buildings. It's also well suited for things like WiMax. The gov't is going to auction off the freed spectrum, raising anywhere from $11B to $40B, depending on who you listen to.
And, for those who are concerned about such things, Congress is trying to figure out how to pay for the converters that people will need to use their current analog TVs with DTV -- they're concerned about voter backlash figure that part of the revenue from the spectrum auction should easily pay for the converters.
I'm not a big fan of the mandate -- only about 16% of the US population gets their TV through broadcast, so you're making these TVs marginally more expensive for the 84% of the people who don't need it. In reality, it won't be very much -- the market will take over and the DTV-capable TVs will cost about what the non DTV-capable TVs do now.
The FCC needs to interfere mainly because spectrum is scarce. If it weren't, then it wouldn't matter.
Considering that the FCC didn't have the authority to require broadcast flag, I wonder how they have the authority to requre DTV receivers.
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.
That said, didn't the courts just decide that the FCC doesn't have the authority to regulate devices? i.e. they can't mandate the broadcast flag, so why should they be able to mandate recievers?
It doesn't really matter, most of them just leave the tuner out entirely and call it a "HDTV Monitor". I'll stick to the HD2000 in my Linux box until things get reasonable. Maybe I'll build the $300 projector described on TomsHardware a while back :-)