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The Dutch Kill Analog TV Nationwide
Willem de Koning writes Yesterday the Netherlands completely ended transmission of analog television signals, becoming the first country in the world to do so. So what about cars and portable TVs? I'm guessing a market will emerge for portable set top boxes / converters." The article mentions the timetable for other countries to go all-digital; by 2011 most or all of the developed world will have made the switch.
[blah blah will] continue to broadcast three state-supported channels and several regional public broadcasters free of charge. In return, it can use the rest of the open bandwidth to charge around $18.50 a month for a package of other channels that is comparable with cable.
.torrent machine and connect that to my television. It won't make me happy, though.
This is more death of free media. If the only FTA transmissions you can get are either state-sponsored or state-supported, how can you reliably get news?
I sincerely hope that, once the analog broadcasts are halted in this country, the corresponding digital broadcasts don't require a monthly subscription charge. If they do, I will have to put together a
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Those obsolete TVs weren't going to last forever in any case. Sometimes you just have to make a clean break from legacy technologies in order to make any progress. At least doing it all at once lets you run reasonably efficient "recycle your old TV" programs.
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1. It's NETHERLAND.
2. It's not a tiny country, Luxembourg is.
3. Germany, Denmark, France and England don't broadcast in Dutch.
And all those obsolete TVs will be dumped in the third world for scrap prices. Going digital might be nice as long as it doesn't destroy the environment and set the third world further back.
Actually, many of those TVs will probably have people buying a digital-to-analogue reciever for $25-$50 because (as CRT tvs become harder and harder to find) it will be cheaper than upgrading your TV to a reasonable sized LCD/Plasma TV (as a guess, $250-$500 for a 25-30 inch LCD TV).
There are millions of people who live on less than $25,000 per year in North America and they are probably not going to rush out to spend hundreds of dollars on a new TV.
c++;
Considering you can travel from one end of the country to another in less than 2 hours, as well as pretty much flat landscape, broadcasting difficulties is not something of a concern for the Netherlands IMHO.
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Radio waves may not respect borders, but they *do* respect the inverse square law, i.e. they don't travel indefinitely. A quick search says that most US radio stations (and I assume tv stations) have a broadcast range of approximate 20 miles. The Netherlands (Holland is a province) has an area of 16,033 sq mi, which means that over 2/3 of the country is out of range of foreign broadcasts.
But the boob-tube helps to keep many Americans as good little pacified consumer / wage slaves.
Almost a guarantee that they'll be tax breaks for buying a new set or converter.
Even so, I'd argue that even if you stuck with 4:3 SD and a built in mono speaker, a Freeview box is worth it for:
- FilmFour
- Some of E4 and More4
- Some of BBC3
- BBC4
- BBC News 24
OTOH, it is true that DTV provides a strong incentive to upgrade your TV. Just wait til FTA terrestrial HD comes along...
Another useless statistic.
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I think that study has it's causation turned all around.
People who wear tweed coats are probably on average more well-informed than people wearing denim shirts with name patches, but that doesn't mean that putting on a tweed coat will magically make you smarter. It might be self-selective earlier on in the chain somewhere.
Fox News didn't exist a decade ago, and now it's the top cable news channel, beating out CNN. A whole lot of people chose to watch it. That underlying preference for the viewpoint that Fox espouses is what separates Fox viewers from PBS viewers. And that preference is probably closely linked to a lot of socioeconomic factors like income level, education level, and occupation, all of which could cause people to be more or less well-informed. Unless you control for all those factors, you can't say (and shouldn't imply) that Fox News makes you stupid. It might be that Fox News' viewers were stupid already.
Looking at the study you linked to (which is by SourceWatch, which I'd argue is somewhat liberally biased) was specifically considering 'misperceptions' concerning the Iraq war and other politically sensitive issues; ignoring the fact that people may in fact be choosing to hold those misperceptions more or less consciously. People are quite capable of believing fervently in things they know not to be true, or at least ought to suspect are not true; to say that something about Iraq is a 'misperception' ignores that someone may decide to support the war in Iraq first, and then choose to believe whatever information best substantiates their already-chosen stance. (On the other side, I know quite a few people who probably believe that G.W. Bush is worse than Hitler and eats a steady diet of nails and raw babies; any information that might detract from this image is quickly ignored.) I think the psychological term for this is confirmation bias. Really, to convincingly show which group of people were more or less informed in an abstract sense, you'd probably want to ask about politically neutral issues.
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Cable companies here in the Netherlands are planning to do the same thing, but they are being careful not to announce it too clearly.
Right now, typical cable networks have about 32 analog channels and around 60-90 digital channels of which some are in premium packages.
Cable companies are agressively marketing their digital packages with offers for free receivers, free premium channels for several months when signing a contract, etc.
They are complaining that 15 euro per month (the typical price for analog plus the digital base package) is not covering the cost and that the income from the average subscriber has to be doubled in the upcoming years.
So, what I expect to happen is within a year they announce that "their digital offering has been a big success" and they cut back the number of analog channels in the base package to use them for more premium channels. Existing programmes will still be part of the base digital package for a while, but when the number of subscribers to their premium packages (which often are 10 euros each) is not increasing rapidly enough, they will move some of these channels that traditionally were in the base package (like Discovery, Nat. Geographic, etc) over to a premium package.
After a while there will be only about 12-16 analog channels left (which the cable companies today have to provide by law) and when "almost all" clients have been forced over to digital this way, the analog package can be dropped just as easily as happened with the terrestrial transmitters yesterday.
("there are only 74.000 viewers left so why bother")
Remember when TV was still considered an important medium? When the EBS was an essential way to transfer flash warnings across a region or the country? When it was even seen as a way children could learn?
Now, no one (in power) seems to really care if the public has access to TV or not. With the rise in expensive digital and HD receivers, and the mass obsoletion of literal tons of cheap, mercury-laden TV tubes, TV will become a luxury. Which, of course, is exactly how it started out in the first place.
We may even witness the death of TV as we know it. By the time analog TV is outlawed, will broadcast TV even be relevant anymore? By 2008 (if that date sticks, which it might not), household datapipes could increase to the point where people will start dumping TV receivers like they're currently dumping POTS lines.
(Go figure -- phones going wireless, and TV going wired.)
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Set top boxes will extend the life of these TVs until they break... while they are not able to tune to a digital channel themselves they CAN still display them.... digital != only HDTV.... and just make sure the set top box has a timer function so the good old VHS recorder will still be useful too ;)
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Err... The whole point of stopping analogue transmissions is to sell off those radio frequencies for other uses.
If you decide to start broadcasting a TV station which obliterates several companies' high speed wireless data connections you're going to get shut down by the FCC pretty quick.
They're not just doing it to annoy people, y'know.
But you can compare coverage of stories side-by-side, and see who got it wrong more often, statistically. Or who interjected more obvious bias more frequently, simply by counting incidents. Websites such as mediamatters.org do that type of thing, or you can compare coverage in various other places on the web. Or look at any study on this type of thing from any group concerned with accuracy in reporting.
If you discover (as I have) that Fox News gets it wrong, likely intentionally, more than any major news source, you can't just say that the people were stupid to start with, even though it certainly plays a part in them choosing to watch it in the first place. If you consider what people watch on TV news to be informing or educating them in any way, then it follows that they must be affected by incorrect and biased news sources, regardless of why they chose to watch those poor news sources in the first place.
So yeah, you're right, they self-select. But that's kind of irrelevant. What they select is inaccurate anyway. And, by definition of it being an "infomation source," it makes them less informed, or worse, misinformed. We can look at the effects (misinformed people), or we can look at the causes (abundant inaccuracies and interjected bias on their shows), and we come to the same conclusion.