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Jan 2009 Deadline for HDTV Cutoff
stlhawkeye writes "Broadcasters have recently accepted a deadline of January 2009 for the mandatory end of analog television signal broadcasts. Broadcasters have expressed concerns that those without subscription television services will see blank screens unless they buy new units. "
A draft bill setting the deadline has bogged down in the House over whether the government should subsidize the purchase of $50 converter boxes for the 15% of households that get their TV signals via antennas. The boxes would convert digital signals to analog.
This is my favorite part of all of this. Not only are those of us that can afford digital TV being double-fucked for the creation of the HDTV standard and then having to pay for the tuner for something we just don't need, we now may have part of our tax dollars pay for someone else's digital tuner converter that can't afford HDTV! Absolutely unnecessary.
Let the market's consumers decide when it wants to adopt a technology. If only 5 million people have adopted the technology so far it's probably because it is infantile, unnecessary, and/or expensive. We do NOT need the government meddling in this and creating headaches, money issues, and horseshit for us. No matter what the pro-TV people say, HDTV is *not* something that the government needed to mandate. There are thousands of other far more important things they could have put time, effort, and dollars towards rather than making sure Friends and Seinfeld reruns, reality TV, and soaps come to you in crisp video.
I have posted on this same exact topic numerous times before but here's one of them.
In a similar sense, sure people can get by using their 56k lines, but wouldn't it be a lot better if everyone had access to fiber, cable, or something else along those lines?
It seems to me that at least part of the reason that America isn't the most technologically advanced nation in the world is because we like to hold on to dying technologies. In the next few years we're going to be seeing HD-DVD and Blu-Ray technology emerging into the marketplace, but a lot of people will still be using VHS.
We might take a hit in the pocketbook, but isn't it time that our country got with the times? I don't mean that we should adopt every new technology even if it's only marginally better, but we shouldn't cling to old technology when there are clearly better alternatives out there.
2009 will be the perfect time to officially throw away your TV
:
I doubt it. I'm sure we'll see this in July of 2008
Broadcasters have recently accepted a deadline of January 2012 for the mandatory end of analog television signal broadcasts.
Add 3, wash, rinse, repeat.
This deserves +10 informative mod. Christ, do these editors do anything anymore? In the last two days there have been numerous mistakes, plain retarded stories, and at least one glaring dupe. Failures.
Sorry, but that is the wrong question. The correct quesions are: Why are we being forced to spend our money on a TV or a set-top box? Why are my tax dollars being spent on subsidizing the purchase of a set-top box?
Is it just me or has the TV-viewing American public gotten totally fucked or what? First we have free TV.. all we needed was a TV and an antenna. This, of course, was supported by advertising. Fair enough.
Next comes cable TV. Sweet! Immunity from foul weather, better content (at least initially) and no commercials! "What's that you say? No commercials? Sorry buddy, I see commercials every damn day on cable TV." Ah yes, friends.. if my recollection is correc, cable TV was supposed to be commercial free as it was a subscription service. But oh how the mighty dollar wins all. We now get 20 minutes of television entertainment for 30 minutes of viewing time (for thsoe wihout a DVR) AND we pay for it!
The boss is calling.. gotta run.
What is your penile percentile?
Here's the problem you're going to run into, although it'll be a small problem by that time. Right now, the *only* people in the US that know about analog broadcasts going away in 2009 (or the fact that that's a new deadline) are the broadcasters and the geeks that read sites like slashdot.
My wife is reasonably well-informed (she reads the news online and browses fark every day), and had no clue what I was talking about when I mentioned it a few weeks ago. My neighbors are clueless, and looked at me like I was crazy when I told them that it was a good thing they had satellite TV, etc.
Here's what I'm guessing: The broadcasters are betting that by 2009, just about everyone will have cheap satellite or cable TV, and (as someone pointed out to me in a previous story on this subject), the people that don't are probably limited enough in purchasing power that it'd be worth the risk to ad revenue to go ahead with it anyway.
You'll hear one or two stories on the news saying "Still using rabbit-ears? Not for long...", then make a small stink about being forced to do it, so people will be mad at the FCC for "springing" it on them, and life goes on as normal.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
the fun part is that NEW analog tv sales STILL outpace HD or even Digital capable Tv sales significantly.
Also digital Tuners that will convert to analog are still INSANELY priced.
when I can get a DTV to ATV tuner for $99.00 then I'll agree that it's a good time to switch.
with DTV's still well over $800.00 and DTV transmitters still 5X the price of the analog gear it is not going to happen.
and everyone forgets about the small town UHF channels. Who is going to buy them a new transmitter when they can barely afford pro-sumer 4 year old camcorders for their news?
Oh and the small college tv channels? what about them?
Who is going to buy them 20 million dollar transmitters?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I dunno. Does WalMart sell Sony TVs? Find who they resell and invest there.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
From the article "Congress also wants to auction the spectrum to wireless high-speed Internet services. Such an auction is expected to raise up to $30 billion for federal coffers." Which I'm sure will be applied to our ballooning war debt.
As an added incentive, there's all the campaign contributions that the Washington hoi-poloi will get from hardware manufacturers, cable providers, wireless wanks, etc. ad nauseum.
But the long and short of it is that that cute little portable all in one TV will be relegated to semi-functional door stop status if the politicos and industry has their way.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Anymore? I can't remember a time when the Slashdot maintainers ever did much editing. I'm not even sure they're properly called editors.
I read the internet for the articles.
Here's what I'm guessing: The broadcasters are betting that by 2009, just about everyone will have cheap satellite or cable TV, and (as someone pointed out to me in a previous story on this subject), the people that don't are probably limited enough in purchasing power that it'd be worth the risk to ad revenue to go ahead with it anyway.
That's precisely the issue--that a technology architecture and phase-out process was taken that can have, as a net result, excluding those who cannot purchase new equipment because they are on limited incomes or can not afford or cannot receive services such as cable or satellite.
I think we need to remember that that the public airwaves are a public good that has merely been loaned out to broadcasters, and that they need to treat it as more than a vehicle to peddle their wares. They can and should serve a public need--i.e. emergency broadcasting, public television, network television, etc, and transition plans to DTV should have a clear path for making sure that large groups of people aren't systematically blocked out from what is, nowadays, an essential medium.
***Foucault is watching you..***
What you fail to mention is that broadcasters get multiple channels of bandwidth or the fact that HD signals (not DTV) take up a lot of bandwidth. Those add up to roughly the same amount as an analog signal so it is really more of a shift in spectrum, not making more efficient use.
.avi's have less artifacting.
I'm not sure how you rate "reliable" but with analog, you could get full clarity or levels of bad all the way down to snow. Digital is either all or nothing. So much for emergency weather alerts.
The clarity of HD signals also comes into question when you consider the MPEG compression artifacts that plague the format. Many P2P
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
It's a spectrum hog, just like your crappy old car the get 7 MPG and spews out smelly grey smoke. I want those channels recycled for UWB and other wireless services. Some might even be new unlicensed Part 15 bands so The Man doesn't get even his geedy capitalist hands on them.
In addition, I live in the SF Bay area where reliable reception of both analog and digital TV is impossible in most areas without a 70 foot antenna tower. So conventional TV broadcast frequencies are useless to me anyway.
Since by 2009 you will be able to build a digital receiver with NTSC analog modulator for about $10 I suspect stations will be able to offer free or dirt-cheap receiver-converters for those poor folks too poor to shell out 50 bucks for a new digital-ready TV so they can watch The Newlywed Gaem or whatever crap that's still on analog TV. Shoot, by 2009 nice plasma TVS are gonna cost about $200.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The correct quesions are: Why are we being forced to spend our money on a TV or a set-top box?
You're not being forced to do anything. If you want to view broadcast TV (which is completely free), you need to have the hardware appropriate to the infrastructure. We're changing the infrastructure because:
(a) long-distance analog signal transmission is a terrible, terrible idea, and
(b) we have a finite amount of useful space in the RF spectrum.
which they will then resell and lease to private industry to generate another revenue stream for the government.
Are you kidding? The federal government does not generate revenue streams. The federal government will basically give the spectrum away to corporations who will in return make large donations to particular politicians' re-election funds. You're right about who will pay for it all though and in more than just money.
"Millions of people now HAVE to buy new TVs. Is it time to invest in Sony?"
No. If you had read the story, you would have seen the part that said a digital to analog converter box can be had for (currently) $50. By 2009, the price of that box will go down to something around $35. What you will see is one of three things to keep analog TVs working:
1) People with analog TVs will go out and buy the converter for their existing TVs.
2) People will buy new analog TVs with the converter box already integrated into the set.
3) People will buy a new analog TV and external converter box.
Analog TVs are still about 10 times less expensive than most digital TVs, and are not going away until TVs as a whole are relegated to history.
One of things people forget when talking about DTV is this:
All High Definition TV is Digital TV. Not all Digital TV is High Definition.
People who have older, analog only sets will need to purchase a new TV that can decode digital signals or a set top box that can decode and output to the old TV.
People who have cable or sattelite will only need a new box if they want HDTV.
--Mike
So the distinction between DTV, ATSC, and HDTV from a broadcasting perspective is really just a nitpick that can be ignored for all practical purposes.
But from a consumer perspective, a "Jan 2009 deadline for HDTV cutoff" sounds like, "Hmm, I need to buy one of those HDTVs because my old one won't work anymore."
In reality, by that time, at most, you will have a rabbit ear converter to take the DTV signal from the air and convert it to NTSC for your TV to display. I would guess that cable and satellite providers will do something similar.
So, I guess I'm stuck with the same 5 or so HDTV channels I have now until 2009? Great.
For the life of me I cannot figure out why HDTV is so slow in terms of content (and high cost). I mean, even Walmart and Target sell HDTVs, but to get a mere 5 or so ("Free") HDTV channels off of cable in my area, it costs almost $80 a month to get digital cable, a box, and pay for all of the hundreds of SDTV channels, where many of them look bad to begin with on an HDTV, and those channels actually look worse than analog cable because of the apparently high video compression levels they use on those channels.
Oh, while we are on content. I understood that part of Voom's "business model" was to have exclusive contracts with networks that have HDTV feeds. Now that Voom has demised more quickly than anticipated, does this mean that my cable company will have access to more HDTV channels?
Jan 2009 is carefully chosen to be right after the next big election, Nov 2008. The broadcasters have tremendous influence in elections through control over TV coverage. If the broadcasters still don't like the transition plan in summer 2008, they will be able to arrange a further deadline extension through pressuring the political parties.
Part of the problem is modern TVs. Get a TV from the 70's or 80's and it'd pull in a great picture. Modern sets are not designed for OTA broadcast reception, only Cable TV -- the largest chunk of their market. Cable TV requirements include strong-signal adjacent channel rejection to keep the neighboring channels from tromping on each other at any strength. Requires a completely different detection circuit than weak-signal capture and demodulation. Modern tuners don't excel at weak signals, only strong ones.
I'm happy not being force to waste money every time someone decides that a current technology is obsolete and everyone should be forced to upgrade!
They're not deciding it's obsolete. They're deciding that if they lobby The Powers That Be to force you to switch to an incompatible technology (and thereby make a purchase), you'll probably eventually cave and buy one of their products, thus lining their pockets.
And The Powers That Be are deciding that this is a Good Thing[TM] because it lines their pockets as well.
And the sad thing is that 95% of us will indeed eventually cave sooner or later and line all of their pockets needlessly (doubly so when you consider just how wealthy the media and manufacturing moguls already are), costing us a bit of food on the table and retirement security, despite our Valorous protests of "Then I Shan't Watch TV After 2009!" here on Slashdot.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW