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Switch to Digital Television Picking up Steam
Alioth writes "The long-anticipated switchover to purely digital TV began last night in Britain. Although digital broadcasts have been available for a while in most parts of the UK, they have been running alongside the old analogue frequencies. Last night, in the small hours, the analogue signal for BBC2 was switched off forever in the town of Whitehaven in Cumbria. Analog signals are expected to have been switched off over the whole of the UK by 2012. Meanwhile in the states Best Buy has stopped selling analog televisions. 'Best Buy is the first consumer-electronics retailer to report an exit from the analog-TV business. More than 60 million U.S. households currently rely on an antennas or analog cable, and cable operators are required to guarantee their customers will receive broadcast channels until February 2012.'"
The article is misleading. Digital television is still broadcast over the airwaves, and you won't have to give up your antenna or switch to pay-TV services like cable or satellite in order to receive it. In fact, the best way to receive HD broadcasts from the major networks is likely via an antenna, as cable & satellite providers sacrifice quality by recompressing the video streams.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
When the signal is poor, it becomes next to unwatchable. Comparable with really bad codecs on the PC. With analog and a poor signal, it may have been grainy but was still watchable to a certain extent. Digital has blocks, pausing, sound artifacts and all sorts of other things that make viewing uncomfortable. If you live in the hilly areas of England, consider getting cable - oh wait, they don't offer that because of the terrain?? Oh well.
Sweden just recently (yesterday) pulled the plug on the analogue broadcast and going for full digital. The only drawback is that they have focused on the old mpeg2 standard, not the mpeg4 which is required for hd resolutions (norway apparently went the whole nine and went for mpeg4, good for them).
Although I'm not very interesterd, tv is so overrated anyway, why not focus more on direct, live, content streamable for the net and paid for individually? TV networks is not for all of us.
Cable has to change because the cable companies want to cram more and more digital channels, on-demand TV, and other services (phone, internet, etc.) onto one piece of coax. Analog channels take up space, and why would cable companies want to transmit both a digital and analog version of the same thing if they're not required to?
It doesn't directly interfere with the broadcast spectrum, but it's not as if it's a completely unlimited resource.
analog channels are a waste of bandwith - look at one on a spectrum analyzer, most of it is empty - and a lot of energy is in the carrier which doesn't actually carry much information - on the other hand a digital QAM is nice and boxy and busy
With the analogue over here you only get BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and C5. Maybe one local tv station too. With Digital you get about 70 channels plus interactive plus better picture quality. It's all free but you have to get a set top box (which are subsidised by the licence fee we pay).
"Oh boy"
In other news, 100% of all logical propositions are either true or false.
Sweden also uses mpeg4 for the HD channel(s); SVT HD which is the main HD channel on the terrestrial digital net is mostly using mpeg4, although now and again they also use mpeg2 for HD. Same for digital cable; some HD channels use mpeg4, some mpeg2.
Non-HD channels all go for mpeg2, though.
If you visit any best buy you will see a 30 second ad ran every 30 min or so that tells you can get a set top box.... A retail store will also make money off set top boxes you have to remember