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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.'"
Why does analog cable have to change?
Its not like it interferes with the broadcast spectrum.
liqbase
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.
The FCC says there will be no more Analog after 2012. The Mayan calendar ends in 2012.
Coincidence?
Rob
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.
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...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
So the old saying "there's nothing good on TV" will always remain true in the future, whether you have an analog or digital TV... there must be some physical law at work behind this... hmmm...
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'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.
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.
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.
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"
Didn't Nostradamus also say the world will end in 2012? Now I get it, what he meant by "world" was actually "analog television". Damn translation problems.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Not bad grammar, just a stutter.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
In other news, 100% of all logical propositions are either true or false.
We've never had analog TV. It's been analogue since the first transmitters came online.
-1 not first post
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 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.