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Who Cares if Analog TV Goes Dark?
AVIDJockey writes "Take this with a grain of salt, but earlier this month the Consumer Electronics Association giddily released data showing that of America's 285 million TVs only 12 percent (33.6 million) are used for watching OTA broadcasts. In a further revelation, the CEA's numbers say that approximately 3 million (around 10 percent) aren't used for viewing broadcast television at all. Instead, the electricity gobbled up by these sets is used to play videogames, watch movies on DVD, or view old Jane Fonda exercise tapes."
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
In the US, HDTV is digital. Analog TV really is going away.
Analog is going away, not standard definition. This is to free up the broadcast spectrum for other uses. I believe the plan is to auction off blocks of the spectrum, and I read somewhere that they estimate all of it together will rake in billions.
As DVB-T allows 30 channels in DVD-quality over the air with only a very small reciever, cable & satellite got an interesting contestant.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Well, me and the other owners of those 33 million TVs might just give a hoot. Not everyone [wants|can afford] cable or dish service, y'know.
Lets see, 33 million? That's a lot of people when you think about it. New York state only has 19.1 million people in it. 33 million is more than the population of most states.
Just how much will I need to spend in order to keep watching TV once they ram this through?
Depends on how much a D/A downconverter box costs at that point. At Best Buy the Funai ATSC/HDTV Receiver with Indoor Antenna will recieve H/DTV (HDTV and SDTV) and convert them to analog ouputs. Cost? $229. It's still a little bit more than you need for your current TV as it will output DVI (although if you have an LCD monitor you can watch it on there).
The CEA (or at least some of its members) have been asking congress for a hard cut off date for when analog will be shut down. They then will start about 12-18 months prior to that date mass producing D/A converter boxes. They expect that they can produce them for sale for somewhere between $50-$80. Specific numbers I have read about are $50 and $66.
I suggest reading TV Technology as they cover the issue quite frequently.
Disclaimer: I work at a TV Network.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
(To Darryl Wilkinson, the author of TFA: At what point in your youth did you decide you wanted to grow up to be a condescending prick?)
I'm very sure the article is satire. From the end:
In related news, the Cable & Satellite Higher Subscription Fee Association released figures claiming that 72 percent of subscribers felt they were paying too little for their monthly programming. 18 percent said they'd gladly pay twice as much if the level of customer service could be lowered. Surprisingly, a full six percent indicated that they'd rather watch TV from cable or satellite than eat or have sex. (The margin of error for the survey is +/- 100 percent.)
He also uses phrases such as "CEA giddily released" and "in a further revelation." These aren't the words of a writer who agrees with the CEA.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
This article is talking about blowing off 12% of a customer base. Apple, by most accounts, only counts for 3% of all PC users
I don't respond to AC's.
I certainly give a hoot. Heck, I'd like to have digital reception, but a new TV is not in the budget and I've yet to see an affordable set top converter box. I say keep the analog signals going until the local brodcasting stations no longer feel its worth the cost to keep them up.
bance.net
How many people own computers in their homes? About 79%.
Now, how many own TVs? Greater than 99%.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The CEA study is real. The last paragraph of the Home Theater article is a intentional joke -- the rest is just inane.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Analog TV really is going away.
Really? I don't think anyone in my family is planning on getting rid of their analog TV,
Well, your t.v. is not going away, but analog broadcasts are most definitely going away. You can watch snow on every channel if you want.
Here's a an article for you describing the gov't debate over exactly when they are going to pull the plug. Looks like they're shooting for about 18 months from now: The End of Analog TV
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
Somebody help me out here. I thought standard television was going away, not analog!
/mandate/ is for digital signals. Those local broadcasters are leasing their bandwidth off to make some extra green on the side as well. That leaves them less badwidth to transmit their own signal, which means that even if they do claim HD, they often do so with a noisy comprression ratio.
They don't make it easy to figure out, but this is the deal:
The FCC is mandating that analog signals go the way of the DoDo once a certain minimum percentage of digital viewership exists (theyfirst set firm dates for this, then realized that no one cared about their dates).
The FCC could not muster less concern for whether or not those digital broadcasts are HD, ED, or SD. They only care that they are digital, becuase the digial signal allows them to parse the signal in ever finer ways to auction off and make more money.
Most people assume that this means the broadcasts will be HDTV, but in fact the only
Locally (Virginia Beach, VA), for instance, the only station to really stick to the idea of very high quality HDTV signals is PBS. Nova looks fscking STUNNING on my HD screen. As for the rest? Well, at least the signal is clear, but as for just how HD it is...I can say it's better than SD and often better than ED, but flipping to PBS shows just how downgraded the HD signal is on local stations like NBC, CBS, and ABC.
Note that locally I have access to every broadcasting network in digital and (ostensibly) HD quality to compare. This means, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, WB, UPN, and PBS.
Also, I have no cable or satellite service. I only watch OTA TV and movies from Netflix. Using a digital receiver, I can get crystal clear pictures that are better than the lossy encoded signal the cable and sat companies give us(though I do miss The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) and I pay nothing. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
I hope that helps clear up some of the confusion.
-Tom
It's not a TV anymore. It's just a monitor.
My new Samsung 50" DLP device is great. I have a mac mini plugged into the DVI port and a DirecTiVo into the HDMI port. And nothing whatsoever connected up to the RF port. The tuner is analog only, so I have no use for it. The part that kind of sucks is that although they have a setup menu that allows you to exclude any ports from the input selection rotation, there is one port that cannot be excluded.
Which one? Take a guess.
So whenever I flip from the mac to the TiVo, it's two clicks instead of one, with a blue screen inbetween.
So I say to any TV manufacturers listening: Do not center any part of the UI around the tuner. It is optional. If I could have paid the same price for a monitor only, I would have done so happily.
You're welcome.
Actually Congress is also trying to get rid of analog radio. Now that will be a problem. Think of all the old radios an average house has. An average car. Survival kits? Tape players... MP3 players.... they're just about everywhere.
I don't know why we keep electing these people.
Original quote:
... probably gone"
:)
"I eventually had to go down to the cellar -"
"That's the display department"
"With a torch -"
"The lights had
"so had the stairs -"
"but you found it didn't you?"
"Oh yes. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'. Ever thought of going into advertising?"
Scarily, that was all from memory. And it was the first thing that came to my mind when reading the above, too
</hitchhiker geek>
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"