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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.
They only discontinued analog broadcasts over the air. The majority of people in the Netherlands get their television service through analog cable and not digital service.
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!"
In the USA and most other countries, color TV signals are backwards compatible with the older black and white standards. Old B&W sets worked just fine on color broadcasts. That's one reason why analog color still looks so crappy to this day: the way color signal was shoehorned into the original standard creates a lot of visual artifacts.
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.
Actually, the state-supported media are more objective than any of the commercial channels.
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get
public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations
with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Only analogue transmissions overether are stopped. Over 90% of the population have cable already (both analogue and digital). What the article fails to mention is that it only impacts about 70,000 people still receiving analogue signals from the air. Plus, the signal is replaced with digital (DVB-T). So these 70,000 can either get a DVB-T or a satelite receiver.
Its you silly English people who name us "the dutch", and our country either "The Netherlands" or even worse "Holland".
We name ourselves (as a country) "Nederland", which is inhabited by "nederlanders".
But I don't see what Dutch investment in the US has to do with anything in this article.
It doesn't, he's just bragging that he personally owns the entire state you live in.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
my real point is- radio waves do not respect borders....
So what?
Ending analogue transmissions isn't intended as a punitive or repressive measure, it's meant to save a laughably small amount of money by ending a service that wasn't really used much anymore.
All these foreign channels are available on their laughably small (analogue) cable networks, free for them to watch on their teeny tiny little TV sets in their silly little houses.
Actually, the state-supported media are more objective than any of the commercial channels.
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get
public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations
with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
In addition to this, you have to realize
1) public broadcasters also feature advertising
2) it has been known for a public broadcaster to become a commercial broadcaster (veronica)
3) workers from failed commercial broadcasters have been known to rejoin the public system (tv10)
All of this mitigates the influence of government. (And the government money mitigates undue influence from advertisers).
The public broadcasters themselves are independent member-run organizations and can (and have) defied government positions. More successfully than the BBC has managed, for instance (turns out they were right about reports about Iraq's weapons being 'sexed up', but they didn't have the balls to say to the government 'you can put in a complaint like any regular citizen').
Additionally, public broadcasters are required by law to have editorial codes that guarantee editorial/journalistic independence for their employees - independence from both the government, advertisers AND the broadcaster itself. The journalist's trade union is always keen to complain about instances of this independence being threatened.
Getting impartial/non-partisan news is hardly the problem. The problem is that the news is either boring (especially the christian broadcasters, always yapping on about 'church matters' or, for some not well understood reason, every minute detail of the troubles in Israel) or alarmist and/or xenophobic drivel designed to compete with the commercial channels.
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Does it really sound like the public is being served by the private media? Don't you wish we would have been a bit savvier when, through being misinformed, we supported our politicians in their attack on Iraq?
Chuck Norris always wins over entropy.
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