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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.'"
It doesn't have to change but eventually the cable companies will want to stop supporting obsolete analog TVs by converting the digital data they receive from broadcast stations to analog (it will just be overhead that costs money, like the phone company supporting pulse dialing now that almost everybody is on tone dialing). The FCC is just requiring cable companies to support analog until 2012 so consumers will have more time to upgrade their home equipment.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Folks, If you are still watching TV in 2007, wake up. Most of the intelligent people that I know--self included--have quit wasting their lives in front of that machine. It's a waste of your life. They did a study once and found that an asleep person has more brain activity than one watching the boob tube. I quit watching it in 8th grade and my life has been much better for it.
I actually support the NTSC-> ATSC Change over. I just think the Cable companies should not be allowed to do what they are doing, and make Digital Cable all encrypted. Essentially, I'm in favor of the governments telling the Cable Companies, You MUST send your signal in unencrypted ATSC for the non-premium channels for your paying customers. They aren't doing that. What they are doing is just the the oppisite. EVERYTHING is getting encrypted by the cable companies, and we are ALL being forced to go to the Digital Tier. The Cable companies will be switching off NTSC Some time, but an ATSC won't replace it. That makes me so damn angry you have no idea. Its going to get to where if you want any Cable at all, you HAVE to have one of their boxes and pay the Digital cable rates.
Otherwise the Cable Company will tell you to go fuck yourself and put up an Antenna.
If you genuinely don't believe that people will think "it's digital I need a new telly that can do digital" and that the retailers aren't going to just go along with it and make loadsamoney then you've never come across someone who was going to throw out their computer because it had a virus!
Is it nice under your rock?
Actually we don't use scripts in the companies I've worked for (I've worked for three), I would generally avoid them anyway as they sound so wooden and lots of times don't have real solutions to the problems the customers are having. Do you know it's possible for your remote to stop working and have the issue be the converter instead? The part of the box that interprets remote control commands can stop working while the box's front panel buttons continue to function. The solution is to unplug the power to the box for a short while. The remote is fine.
I also do tech support for internet and digital phone, and I grudgingly do sales and billing support. If tech support people have so little credibility with you, I don't know why you'd adopt cable services that virtually guarantee you'll be calling us more often.
For video, I have people who call because...
Now if we look at this list, these are the seven technical issues I deal with most for video (in no particular order). Three of these issues will effect both analog and digital service. The other four will only effect digital service, though. The audio/video syncing issue will happen most on digital, when it happens on analog it's a station issue (not your cableco). The PPV/VOD can be ignored since it isn't available on analog (analog PPV is leaving if not gone already). None of these issues will effect only analog service, though. This is the basis for my assertion analog cable is more reliable. I can look over the call histories for digital customers and there are customers who call us at least once a month for some service issue. Meanwhile, many of the analog customers go years without calling for a service issue.
Here's the real shocker, people actually believe there is a difference in the customer service between companies. I really work for an outsourcer, and several of the nations larger cable companies have had support provided by us over the years. So when you call your cable company, we're working across the aisle from other companies' reps. Sometimes your cable provider's direct competitors. Also, employees are transferred between these companies quite often, a few work for more than one at the same time (at different hours). If there is difference in the kind of care you receive between providers, its pretty much dependent on how much access those reps are given to the billing/tech systems, and what company's policies are.
Believe me, we generally are on your side when you call for credit on some issue that was small in the grand scheme of your monthly service but large in your viewing habits, but we can't always grant credit because we aren't allowed to.
It doesn't have to change but eventually the cable companies will want to stop supporting obsolete analog TVs
That would be TVs without the newest nVidia card?
This is TVs we are talking about, they don't (normally) get obsolete two months after you buy them. I recently bought a brand new TV (recently in TV terms being like 6 years ago), and there was almost no digital TVs to be had back then (and if there were any, the prices were way out of range). So, I have a TV that will work just fine for at least another ten years, but is becoming obsolete because some d*ckhead politicians decided that TV producers don't get enough money, and should get a chance to sell TVs to people who already have working TVs.