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FCC Says Analog TV Lives Until 2012
walterbays writes ""The FCC voted 5-0 to require that cable operators must continue to make all local broadcasts available to their users, even those with analog televisions." I don't understand how AT&T manages to deliver U-verse without any analog channels. Did they get it classified as not-cable and exempt from existing rules? Or as a result of this vote, will they suddenly have to drop 50 SD channels to make room for 5 NTSC channels?"
I've been arguing it here for years- we aren't going to switch to digital TVs anytime in the next 5 years. Too many people still only have analog TVs. Watch them decide to push back the OTA deadline next. Until analog only TVs are under 5% of the install base, they won't make that move.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Seriously, I would love to know what this has to do with AT&T. Of course U-Verse was declared not to be cable, since it isn't cable. How is this relavent in the context of the article? A non-cable television service doesn't have to follow the same rules as a cable television service? What a shocker!
Mod me as you will, but you know you're thinking the same thing.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
The only way to really get up to date is to have the balls to dump the past.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The primary difference between 1.2 and 1.3 at the consumer level is that 1.3 can carry Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD to your receiver to decode, and 1.2 can't. If you buy a 1.2-only player, you'd best have a receiver that has discrete inputs for each speaker so that the DVD player can decode for you, or you won't be getting HD-quality surround out of it. You also won't be able to switch that source through an HDMI switcher.
Point being, there certainly is a tangible difference. It's a shame the salesman didn't know it to educate you properly.
The guarantee is that every 5 years, you need to spend 10 grand on another entertainment setup. This, and excessive advertising, have combined to push myself and my household entirely out of the market. Now they get nothing. We don't own any TVs, PVRs, or any of that nonsense. We don't pay money every month for cable TV or satellite that still has ads that we have to pay a further subscription to try and skip the ads on tivo and run in to intentional scheduling errors, or any of their other BS. We're done, and we've been done for almost 3 years now.
Instead, we have one computer that has a large monitor. Now, admittedly, our "large" monitor isn't anywhere near the size of a 2000 inch TV that takes up an entire wall of most people's living rooms. But we've gotten over that. We can still comfortably watch any movie we want in DVD format. With no commercials, on our schedule. I know some slashdotters will still get up in arms about the DRM on the DVD format and whatnot, but we're a regular, non ubergeek family. We don't care. Now the only money anyone gets from us in this fashion is the $17/month it costs for Blockbuster Online.
Isn't that fun? Not really; and I don't suspect our family will be the last to be pushed out of the market by their bullshit. When you add it all up; its just not worth it anymore. Now we spend the money doing other things; going out and having fun. It's alot better for our relationship, too.
~Rebecca
One of us is confused -- either me or the summary. From my parsing of TFA, it seems to me there are two separate things going on here that are being intermingled.
First, there is a rule requiring cable companies to do what they already do, for the most part -- have analog outs on their digital set top boxes. I don't think they'll care so much about that.
Second, there is a rule that they must continue to carry local channels, even after the digital switchover, some of which they'd love to replace with more lucrative pay cable channels.
What I can't tell from the summary or the article is if both of these requirements are in effect until 2012 or just one.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
MTV hasn't shown a music video (or anything that actually even remotely classifies as "music", for that matter) since the early 1990s; there's championship "wrestling" on the Sci-Fi Channel (and don't even get me started on the so-called "sci-fi" called "Painkiller Jane" or "Flash Gordon" - please bring back SG-1!!!!); TechTV got merged with G4, and promptly went to the sh*tter quite fast; and most of the "news" channels don't seem to have gotten the message that we really don't give a rat's ass about Paris & Britney!
You realize the industry is in a transition. There will be chaos and panic and random merges or non-scifi shows on Sci-Fi for some time to come. Newspapers are migrating online, CNN released their video service for free. Classic TV scrambling to hold "eyeballs" lost to torrents and online shows.
It's nothing to wonder about.
In 10 or so years, new leaders will emerge, producing content in a very different way, and they will likely be nothing like the current ones.
If TV isn't worth watching right now, don't watch it. You'll find there are plenty of better ways to get entertainment in or out of your home.
I watch NBC, CBS, Fox, CTV, CityTV, CBC, Discovery, National Geographic, PBS and ABC in HD all the time via Satellite here in Canada. They look beautiful and have good programming too.
:-)
Stop watching crap
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
get over it. It's not the end of the world if poor people want to watch fuzzy TV.
And I can't believe how terrible the sound quality is on GSM networks compared to CDMA networks. I'm glad there are choices in the US. One technology to rule them all kind of sucks.
Also it's just a cellphone, many people don't have cellphones, get over it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Over-the-air HD looks like crap anyway. They are not using enough bandwidth and/or the codecs are not good enough to handle LARGE amount of change in a scene. Watch any football game, when the scene is still, like on a player/coach or just before the ball snaps, it looks incredible. But once 22 people moving along with the camera angle, the clarity and sharpness are gone until the scene settles down. No, it's not motion blur, it's insufficient bandwidth to accurately decode the scene. You can also see in the first 1/8 or 1/4 second when a scene changes, everything is blocky, then comes into sharp focus. Or watch as logos fly across the screen, you'll see the blocky artifacts there too. I'm just surprised that more people are not complaining about the quality.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Actually, if analogue TV transmissions stops, then I just won't bother buying a TV. A computer is good enough for what little motion video I watch and I have a strong suspicion that many people will do the same thing. A complete switch to digital will likely cause the TV stations to permanently lose a lot of viewers.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
1080p devices were not available until 2005, so there's no way you were watching a shuttle launch on a 1080p device in 1999.
You don't need to wait for the switchover in order to enjoy HD content now, or even 5 or 7 years ago. Most major markets have local stations that broadcast HD OTA (including PBS channels). Most cable operators provide local channels in HD as well, and have other HD content (premium channels like HBO and Showtime as well as non-premium HD channels like Discovery), and satellite operators have had HD channels available for years as well. DVDs look good on HD displays even with their 480p resolution limit (upconverting players can make the DVDs look somewhat better, but the main reason to buy an upconverting DVD player is to match the video output to your display's native resolution for fixed-resolution devices like LCD, DLP, and plasma). HD-DVD and Blu-Ray obviously have HD movies, but even if you don't care to hop on one of those bandwagons you can download HD movies on an Xbox 360 or you can download HD rips of TV shows and movies from your favorite torrent site. Current video game consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3 support HD resolutions (the 360 supports all resolutions for all games via upscaling game backbuffers that are typically 720p, while the PS3 only supports specific resolutions for specific games; the Xbox 360 solution is superior for fixed-resolution displays even if it means that 1080p games aren't really rendering in 1080p), and even the previous generation consoles like Xbox and PS2 supported some HD resolutions for some games (for example, Gran Turismo 4 on PS2 can run at 1080i).
The FCC switchover will only mandate how TV signals are broadcast. It says nothing about the quality of the content. Even if the switchover ever happens, you can expect to still get plenty of SD content on the new "digital" channels.
Won't be supported by what? If the TV has an OTA tuner, it'll still be able to receive OTA HD broadcasts. If it accepts HD signals via component or RGB/VGA, it will continue to accept those signals. The only thing that may break slightly older TVs (pre-HDMI sets, or broken-HDMI sets) will be the broadcast flag, but that's currently in legal limbo.
Ok, let's compare. Analogue TV - hrm, the edges look a little fuzzy. HD - wow, that's really sharp, oh wait they moved the camera a little and now it's got big MPEG artifacts the size of my thumbnail. Think I'll stick with analogue, at least until digital TV doesn't look like ZX81 graphics.
The most pressing reason for me ---being in Denmark, where the switch will decidedly happen in 2009--- is that nobody seems able to give a clear answer about what that "box" really is.
The most enlightened answer I got was that you will need a converter box, even for new tv's.
What I *really* want to know, and nobody seems able to answer, is *what comes out of that box?* Does it deliver an analog antenna signal, or one analog tv channel? This is important because in one case I can't use my own tuner, and that's a bit daft when I have a VCR as well. If one has to manually set the channel on this additional box, all television recording becomes, well, tricky at best.
Perhaps that's what they're after, and they're just not saying (remind you of online radio, anyone?).
"Good news, everyone!"