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."

Comments

I never did understand...

[leeharris100]

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?

Re:I never did understand...

[unitron]

"What I'd like to see is a transverter box of some kind that I can hang off my antenna that will shift the frequencies received back into the normal TV band and convert from digital to analog (which would technically not make it a transverter, but you get my drift). Has anyone seen anything like this on the market?"

What you're asking for is a block converter.

In the earlier days of cable when many if not most TVs still had rotary tuners, the cable companies put channels other than 2-13 on other VHF frequencies. The cable boxes from the cable companies generally tuned one channel at a time and shifted it to VHF channel 2, 3, or 4 so that you could set your TV to that channel and then choose channels with the cable box.

There were aftermarket devices which shifted the cable channels up to the UHF broadcast frequencies simultaneously so that you could tune them in with your television's UHF tuner. They were called block converters because they converted a block of channels up in frequency at the same time instead of one at a time. If you put a splitter on the output you could watch two different cable channels on two different televisions at the same time without needing a cable company cable box (or paying rent on it) for either set.

It might be possible to come up with something like that for broadcast digital channels, but don't expect anything like that for cable and satellite channels. Satellite and cable companies, especially cable companies who see "cable ready" televisions and VCRs as having cost them a fortune in lost cable box rentals, aren't going to want to surrender even that much control. The cable companies can hardly wait to go completely digital and re-use a lot of the analog frequencies for other revenue opportunities.

So whenever you hear about how great digital is going to be for the consumer what they really mean is how greater the number of opportunities for spending money the consumer will have.

Faster

[mboverload]

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.