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.'"

Comments

errr

[LiquidCoooled]

Why does analog cable have to change?

Its not like it interferes with the broadcast spectrum.

Re:errr

[ccs.gott]

I like the way you are going with this. This will hurt poor people. This will help companies like Wal-Marx sell loads of cheap (presumably made in china) Digital sets at the last minute while creating all sorts of unneeded discards of CRTs.

Re:errr

[david.given]

They want to know what you watch and when you watch it.

Not with DVB-T, they don't. It's a broadcast signal with no return path.

They want to be able to cut off your signal when they feel like it.

...hardly different from analogue.

They want to prevent you from recording what you watch.

DVB-T digital recorders are ubiquitous here. Alternatively, buy a cheapo DVB card for you PC, and you can capture an entire multiplex in real time --- record thirty-odd channels at once. If your hard disc is hard enough.

They want you to buy new TVs.

Or you could just buy one of the incredibly cheap set-top-boxes that plug into your existing analogue TV, for practically no money, that have been advertised here intensively by everyone including the BBC, for years.

A couple weeks ago I wanted to watch a DVD. And I became slightly enraged at how I couldn't skip those damn publisher logo and copyright crap. It's all because of the digital age.

That is correct. However, they only have that control over you because you're buying into the whole idea that they have control over you --- you're a willing participant to make it work. If your DVD player won't skip the unskippable stuff, get another DVD player. Practically all decent (i.e. non-name-brand) players will start playing the movie immediately, bypassing all the menus, if you insert the disk into the drive, start it playing, and then press STOP, STOP, PLAY. It's a similar 'hack' to the ubiquitous macrovision disables and region code bypasses. The people who make the DVD players know their customers, and they know who pays them. Alternatively, just plonk the thing in your PC and do whatever the hell you feel like with the digital stream.

Don't get enraged. Get smart. Digital data gives the content providers lots of control, true. But it also gives you exactly the same amount of control. All you have to do is decide to use it.

Re:errr

[solitas]

The cable companies want to stop supporting analog signals now - they can fit eight digital signals in the 6mhz space of one analog channel. They can also fit 7 HD channels in the space of two analog channels. (disclaimer: this info comes from a technerd friend who works for Charter) And, of course, the more channels they can push on you the more they can charge you.

BUT they don't have to stop supporting analog sets - there'll still have to be a box (theirs) between your set and the head-end no matter what, and the box can output analog channels 3/4 or digital channel [whatever] or NTSC-composite or s-video, or SDI, VGA, or whatever to connect to your TV or monitor & speakers.

The digital/analog boxes in the field now will last looong past 2012 and the cables would be idiots to replace them as long as they're functioning. Consider: "we're recalling your box, you can either upgrade your set or cancel your account" - consumer ill-will and corporate suicide in the same sentence.

Re:errr

[aywwts4]

In my experience it seems like they want to fit 15 HD channels in the space one analog channel.

A friend got an HD TV, and it looked real bad, so the first thing I did was check all their connections to make sure they were really running HD the whole way, The cable company setup their HD receiver to a giant HD plasma display, over one composite cable. after a search for a few more RCAs to switch him over to component he was running HD but the picture looked even worse. All I did was sharpen the suck in 720p.

It had digital artifacts that reminded me of Real Media movies, on a 56k modem, back in 2000. When people blinked or their mouths moved the shape of their face updated, but the texture stayed the same, very unsettling. Every reporter had a fuzz around their head that looked like a swarm of gnats flying around them, if the camera moved the whole picture took a seccond to update, and at times of high motion the scroll on the bottom became gibberish with lines overlapping lines.

Admittedly it was HD, in times of low/no motion it was a real 720p picture. I'm hoping this is just an encoding error on this providers part and not representative of a trend in digital cable.

2012 now in the US?

[Red Flayer]

They keep pushing back the date of conversion to all-digital in the US... don't be surprised if 2012 becomes 2014 down the road.

It's funny, I'm holding out on buying a huge-display HDTV until prices drop due to the increased production/sales volume from the forced conversion to digital.

Every time the year gets pushed back, I spend the money on something else instead... and my understanding is that the deadline is partly due to low penetration of digital sets in the US. Seems like a negative feedback mechanism to me... if they made a deadline and stuck to it, maybe people like me would actually buy a new TV set like the electronics companies want.

Another thing, pretty tangential, that occurs to me is that forced conversion to digital TV will probably cause more civic unrest than anything else the US government has done lately. Taxes (as always) and TV reception could be the biggest campaign issues of the 2014 midterm elections...

Underwhelmed by digital

[Experiment 626]

I'm one of those people still on analog cable, and don't see any reason to switch in the foreseeable future. The cable company charges more for digital, and paying more money to have the same shows broadcast to me via protocol X instead of Y just doesn't appeal to me. Then there are the complications digital brings to using a DVR. CableCard brings more fees and DRM, or you can record the output from a cable box and have to use an IR blaster and all that.

As someone whose TV is non-HD, digital seems to have all downside and no benefit.

slow migration

[pe1chl]

Analog signals are expected to have been switched off over the whole of the UK by 2012.

Why so slowly? Over here (Netherlands), analog signals have all been switched off in a single night last year, with the final decision having been made only a couple of months earlier. It was a simple matter of "what does it cost to keep the old system running, per viewer, and what is the cost for conversion to digital".
The fact that operating a digital TV transmitter wastes less energy might have weighed in too.

Re:The problem with digital....

[Anonymous Coward]

Though if your analogue signal is that bad, you probably already have satellite tv.

I live in a basement flat (rented from a landlord, not my mother :p), and I receive no worthwhile analog signal. I have a television, but do not receive or record ANY signal. The TV licence inspector visited me, and I showed him my setup. He asked some boilerplate questions, and I have since had it in writing from the TV license authorities that I'm ok.

TV LICENSING BRISTOL BS98 1TL Tel: 0870 243 0229 Fax: 0870 240 1187 E-Mail: tvlcsc@capita.co.uk Our Ref: TVL18xxxxxx8 28/02/2007 Dear Mr Cxxxxxxe Thank you for your reply to my colleagues' letter, which has crossed over in the post. As you have received a visit from our Officer, and you have let us know that you do not use television equipment, I have now annotated our records to show a set is not in use at your address. We have updated our records accordingly. This will protect your address from mailing, for a longer period than would normally be set at an address, as it has been confirmed that a set is not in use. Some unscrupulous people will use this particular action as a form of evasion. I am sure you will appreciate, we have a responsibility to the Licensing Authority and the licence holding public to be certain of the licensing requirements for each address hence the instigation of the new process. I hope the information above clarifies the situation. Yours sincerely Cxxxs Rxxxxxs TV Licensing

Re:Digital TV works over antenna

[yuna49]

I just bought an HDTV about a week ago and experimented with HD reception via an antenna and via direct cable input (from Comcast). My house happens to have an obsolete UHF yagi on the chimney so the quality of reception over the air using the antenna was quite good. When I connected the cable directly to the TV's coaxial connector, I got the same program quality but more digital channels since there were a couple of distant PBS stations that are unavailable via broadcast. I was actually quite surprised how simple it was to add the channels using ATSC; I just connected the cable and told the TV to scan the available bandwidth.

Re:The problem with digital....

[TemporalBeing]

When the analogue signals are turned off this will allow a power increase for the digital signals which then reduces digital signal reception problems.

Regardless of how much power you push, there will always be people within the viewing area that will get a degraded signal.

For instance - I currently live within 5 miles of two broadcasting stations. I get neither because of the terrain. Pumping up the signal will not fix that. I also get two other channels - one comes in clear (not sure where it is broadcast from) and the other goes in and out - likely terrain issues too. Pumping up the signal would work somewhat to clear up the channel, but not totally fix the issue.

Additionally you have other things that cause interference that degrade the signal too. And pumping up the signal will not fix those either. And I am not talking about the simple interference of broadcast bleeding - which, btw, is indicative of someone pumping up their signal too. Power lines and numerous other things cause interference and degrade signal.

The GP is correct. Analog was good in that if you got some signal you could possibly watch it, but it may not be the best. (You might have b&w instead of color, or crackly sound, but you can watch it.) With the Digital signals any amount of interference will corrupt the stream and you will lose all the content - it 100% or nothing.

Add to it how much an EMP attack would effect the two - analog would survive, digital would be toast - and there are other repercussions too.

Oh, and don't forget the DRM that MPAA, RIAA, NFL/NBA/NASCAR/etc, et. al wants added to it - so that they can control what you can and cannot record.

Yeah - digital TV is the doom of TV. At this rate, we'll be TV free by the time our grand kids (or great grand kids) come around. TV will a blip in history between the 1930's and 2050's.

Clear QAM is your friend

[Anonymous Coward]

When I plug my $20 a month bottom of the line cable into my Westy Clear QAM HDTV, I get all of my local channels in digital and HD.

I subsequently deleted all the analog channels from the TV. I don't need those relics.

Re:Digital TV works over antenna

[rickb928]

"cable & satellite providers sacrifice quality by recompressing the video streams:"

The dirty little secret of calbe & satellite. Nasty nasty nasty.

Personally, I loathe the MP4 streams they give us so often. Watching a dark background posterize into a single shade of bleagh on a static scene is unnerving. Not to mention the lack of detail. HD was supposed to be HIGH-def. Much of it is being compressed into something almost as good as SDTV.

Of course, there are some HD channels that give it up in full def. But chances are, you oughta buy a set with a tuner in it. After all, OTA is 'free'. Kinda as in beer.

Re:The problem with digital....

[pilgrim23]

I really don't CARE. I watch mainly torrents because the shows I am interested in are never ON: "Go Open" out of S Africa,. DL.TV, Cranky Geeks, Way cool documentaries from Sweden, BBC, and Poland, some fine movies from Hong Kong New Deli and Singapore... World Wide shows. You know...the sort of thing that was PROMISED by televison, and started to happen in the 1950s but was immediately crushed: World wide, information flow... That stuff which was squashed by the needs of commercial interests, propaganda machines, government, and NY executives.
Turning off analog TV (I have a roof top antena) would only stop me from watching the morning weather report. Thankfully, AM radio is still available so. the only looser here is the morning news advertisers...

Re:people don't understand technology

[EvilSS]

The converter box vouchers from the FCC should help with this. I imagine the big retailers will be clamoring for them and offering a ton of inexpensive boxes so they can rake in those vouchers.