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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.
Every few years the so-called "deadline" keeps getting pushed back. Looks like I can keep my regular old TV set for a few more years.
And what makes this more hysterical is that the early adopters got screwed, buying plasma TVs only to find out they didn't support HD. Then the next set of adopters bought HDTVs, only to find out they were not HDMI compatible, and therefore, couldn't run HD content.
So, this new push-back of the deadline gives the content makers and the hardware companies more time to develop a whole new DRM scheme to screw those of you who just bought HDMI compatible equipment.
The guarantee is that every 5 years, you need to spend 10 grand on another entertainment setup.
Isn't that fun?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The only way to really get up to date is to have the balls to dump the past.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Is offering a proprietary converter box (digital to analog), for a nice monthly fee, going to qualify as available? That could mean that citizens wouldn't be allowed to purchase any third party devices, essentially enlarging cable operator monopolies.
It seems like they'll pick option #2 here, and then either charge legacy users a fee to get a box, or just jack up everyones' rate by $5. Everyone is going to end up with a box either way, it's the only way to watch cable given that CableCARD so far is a bust and the cable companies seem anxious to start doing SDV rollouts.
And then there's the fact that the cable industry's main association is happy about this. What's up with that!?Seriously, by 2012, who the heck is going to even want to **own** a television anyway? On the bright side, I wonder what bittorrent will look like by then?
Typical U-verse (as delivered to my house in Oakland, CA) uses a Motorola VIP1200 IPTV set-top box (see http://www.motorola.com/content.jsp?globalObjectId=7460-10536-10543), which among things has an NTSC composite video output connector (see http://www.motorola.com/mot/image/16/16315_MotImage.jpg). It will even send a signal via an RF coax connection fercrissake!
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.
Now my crackpot friends have something to add to their theories... the Mayan Calendar, the solar system passing through the plane of the galaxy, and the end of analogue tv MUST mean that 2012 is the end of the world!
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
AT&T and Verizon get out of it by not carrying any analog channels. Cable has this option as well, but will have to provide Set Top Boxes to all of their subscribers (just like AT&T and Verizon do) which they don't do now, especially in small and rural markets. Also this doesn't apply to all, or even most, channels it only applies to must carry channels, which are channels that the cable company (or telco) is required to provide... requiring them to provide these channels to all of their subscribers makes sense to me.
If I were a television manufacturer, I would have already colluded with other television manufacturers to produce units that would spontaneously fail after 2 and a half years.
Gold Star (now LG - "Lucky Gold Star", not "Life's Good" as they claim) used to be infamous among electronics service techs for powering everything from the CRT filament to the audio stages from the flyback transformer. Crank up the volume too loud and for too long, fry the audio amplifier, which overloads the flyback, which takes out the horizontal output transistor. Now you have a dead TV and a service bill more than it would cost to replace the set.
They did that a *long* time ago. The days of 20+ year lifespans from TV sets are long gone. It's like the days of the 20+-year-old Maytag washer.
(In other news, I have a Sony Trinitron KV-1710 from 1975, and a KV-1926 from 1988, both of which still work perfectly. My first color TV was a 1970 Admiral Solar Color, which I had until 1996. But I see lots of newer sets (2-5 years old) at the curb.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
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!
Well of course, isn't that when the world ends.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
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!"
For years consumer electronics firms have anticpated the digital convergence, where the television becomes the computer and everything else all rolled into one. I've worked on a few of these projects. But the consumer electronics companies won't be the ones to do it: they do not understand software, design bare bones hardware, and seek to keep everything proprietary for customer lock-in. WebTV is probably the most notable of these failures.
Digital TVs are crappy, inflexible computers. The convergence is happening, but it won't be the TV that reigns: it will be the computer in what Steve Job's refers to as the 'digital hub'. Duh. Been saying this myself since '92. Amazingly, he seems to be the only exec who understands the forces behind the convergence.
The computer will be the television. I already have a 30" LCD monitor on my desktop. My computer can play a huge variety of formats in many resolutions. My computer is already attached to a cable company data network. When/if cable companies wise up and start the leverage their data services, offering on-demand video via software clients over their data networks, the convergence will really pick up.
But the cable companies are just as stuck in their thinking as the consumer electronics firms: it could be that iTunes or like technology ursurps their current potential advantage for content delivery AND presentation, not through anything other than corporate vision which doggedly persues ease-of-use.
"You have liberated me from thought."
This reason is precisely why the FCC should be pushing harder towards a fixed analog cutoff deadline. Todays analog TV had a good run. Cable companies could provide (as they do now) converters and HDTV antennas for the 'wireless guys' can convert to old fashion RF/composite/s-video if needed. We need to make the break though. Sooner, not later. I want my UHDTV before 2200.
This is my #1 gripe about going digital. I want the same convenience I have of screwing the coaxial cable into my TV and the TV can tune the channels (usually 70 or so). I don't want a set-top box. I want to be able to go to Best Buy or some A/V store and buy a TV that will tune digital channels. Hassle free. Until then, cable operators can pound sand.
No one except a very few luddites (and older OnStar users) use AMPS in the US.
AMPS is still very much in widespread use in the US.
All over Alaska, AMPS is what works due to the vast expanses and rugged terrain. Only in the (very few) larger cities is GSM and CDMA in greater use in that state. The majority of the used AMPS phones sold on Ebay, etc, are bought by Alaskans.
All along the Gulf Coast, AMPS is the prevalent cellphone technology used by the maritime world there. GSM and CDMA signals will not carry very far out over the water. There are many AMPS tower operators along the Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida shorelines running sectorized anntenna arrays pointed out over the water where you may be able to get AMPS signal/dialtone easily 30 miles out or farther. The used/refurb AMPS handset market for the Gulf mariners is 2nd place behind Alaskans. Good used Motorola bag phones sell especially well to the shrimp boaters.
Many burglar and fire alarm companies have AMPS phones integrated into their customer premises equipment where landline phone service is not readily available, they are scrambling fast now to replace hardware which has worked fine for years and in their point of view is only being made "forced into obsolescence" due to someone else's desire to gouge more money out of them.
All over rural US, like the vast Great Plains over western Oklahoma, eastern Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, today you can drive for miles and not get a GSM or CDMA signal, but you can get an AMPS signal. I fly all over this region in small aircraft (servicing the agricultural spray plane industry) and make sure I carry a cellphone that still has AMPS capabilities because if I'm out in Bumfock, KS working on an Air Tractor and need to call Olney, TX for spare parts, my cellphone still works out here in the middle of nowhere. Needless to say, if my own plane has a problem and I have to dead-stick it into some farmer's field 40 miles from the nearest town, I want to be able to call and get a ride. I've got a Nokia CDMA phone from US Cellular, and it still has AMPS fallback capability. The brands and models of cellphone handsets that still have AMPS capability are getting fewer and farther between (some Samsung, LG and Kyocera models now that Nokia is out of the CDMA biz), however, and the only carriers that still have them are Verizon and US Cellular, and probably this time next year, you won't even be able to get any more phones that can do this as they are all being discontinued. The carriers are not building any new GSM or CDMA towers out in these rural areas anytime soon however, and the AMPS towers have been here since the late 1980's, so soon these rural regions are just flat outright going to be just S.O.L. for wireless phone service until the big carriers decide to build out their networks some more to these (very unprofitable) areas. The private operators who are running the old AMPS towers are not going to shut them down in Feb 2008, but are going to keep them running as long as the equipment hold up, but when it fails, they won't be replaced.
In the UK the digital tv signals are in spectrum space, close to the analogue stations so you don't necessarily need to buy a new terrestrial aerial.
However, the quality of the analogue tv, both the audio and video have been progressively been made worse to make digital tv look good. Digital FTA (free to air) tv is over-compressed to hell and back video and very substandard low bitrate audio. Satellite digital tv is better than terrestrial FTA. Both systems suffer from idiotic channel number changes for seemingly no reason meaning people re-tuning boxes (complicated thing for older people / technophobes), mucking up the order of many user pre-set stations lists. Analogue tv you just setup and forget about it.
And these problems are just talking of standard definition tv, you don't even want to think what will happen if they ever put HD video out, more compression, more rubbish etc.
The same problems exist with DAB-radio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting Digital Audio Broadcasting). The quality of FM radio, (DAB hopes to replace FM), is being made worse and worse. DAB in the UK is seriously low bitrate MP2 audio, some of the lowest bit-rates in the world, and many stations that are in stereo on FM are in mono on DAB, saves money. The DAB CODEC is a seriously old, and the error correction for DAB radio is cr@p.
While many countries around the world are going straight to DAB+ (more up-to-date CODEC and error correction compared to DAB), the UK is flogging DAB because the companies don't want to spend money on the more efficient and better system.
So, from the UK point of view, digital tv and digital radio are horrible technologies being used to squeeze as many cr@p stations as possible into the space, whilst making the experience of viewing and listening painful to eyes and ears.
Take Nobody's Word For It.