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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.
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.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
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.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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")