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Many Analog TV Watchers Aren't Aware of Upcoming Switchover
A recent poll of TV watchers shows that many Americans aren't aware the end times are coming for analog broadcast signals. "The survey found that the group most affected by the analog cutoff -- those with no cable or satellite service -- are most in the dark about what will happen to their sets: Only one-third of them had heard that their TVs are set to stop receiving programs. Of course, there are solutions. Congress is subsidizing the purchase of digital television receivers. And the cable TV industry is hoping that this will spur the last holdouts to buy pay TV."
...to start the family exercising to help beat obesity?
If TV gets turned off on Americans, maybe it would be a good thing.
And don't flame me. TV is the major issue with American obesity, particularly in children.
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Rich: no worries about money, because you have plenty. Poor: no worries about money, because the government will provide for you. Keep watching TV.
because they are too busy adjusting their rabbit ears...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
As soon as TV stations themselves begin to worry about whether they will lose watchers, they will simply run commercials explaining to people how they can get *free* converter boxes from the government. TV is the one of the most effective communication mechanisms ever devised, after all. Problem solved.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
There are people that can't afford cable TV still. Are they the type of person to keep up on tech news? I think it's unlikely. And it is a problem because there are still a significant amount of people that watch broadcast TV. It's probably the only way the local channels are staying in business at this point. I have a feeling this forced switchover is going to be the death of a lot of broadcast stations.
[insert witty quote here]
Money, or so some think.
What would be exquisitely funny is if they threw the whole upgrade party, and everyone just went on the internet instead.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I wish we'd done away with interlacing when the HD standards were being written.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In the UK you can get set-top boxes that plug into your analogue TV or video recorder and give you a DVB-T tuner. They're about 30 quid in any supermarket. Allowing for the UK being slightly more expensive than the US, and the dollar being so low, that's probably still only about $50.
It's not like people need 14 months to save up for a digital TV. A 'good enough' off-brand 32" TV runs $700 now, and it'll probably be more like $500 later.
That's two or three months rent in many places -- with the matching lower pay.
The type of person that can spend $500 on a television set and doesn't have cable/satellite is probably not a big TV watcher.
And I just want to point out that if Congress has to subsidize receivers to force this change along, it's probably not a good idea in the first place. And let me also point out that F*@& Congress for spending tax money on paying for unnecessary digital upgrades. Next they'll be buying everyone blue ray and HD-DVD players to fund the HD war. It's frustratingly ridiculous.
[insert witty quote here]
I can honestly do without tv. I get most of my news & entertainment online. The only way I will "switch over" is if cable companies drop their increased pay for HD channels. And to what someone else said about a tv for $700, some people have bills to pay & a family to feed. We can't drop that kind of cash at one time. Maybe with an income tax return, but we'll see when the time comes.
So what exactly did all those people who couldn't afford TV's when they first came out do? Wow they must have suffered a great deal. :/
I haven't checked lately but I believe they are still selling analog TVs at a lot of places. I know I saw some over the summer. I'm sure the salesmen aren't exactly pointing out the fact the TV will go dark unless you get an expensive converter box in 18 months. They should have been phased out less than 24 months before the switch over and 36 months would have been better. I can see a sudden influx of TVs into the local landfill with a disturbing number fairly new. It may have been well intended but it's hardly eco friendly making a large number of electronics into very large paperweights overnight.
A dish with 2 LNBs is about 60 bucks.
To the mods: my comment was absolutely not meant as flamebait: there are enough alternatives if you still HAVE to watch TV. Tech has to go on, and analog TV (IMHO) just has to die.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
We've already converted to digital. Many has cut of their TV contract. I never had one, and I woun't get one. Only crap on telly. Many agree and this worries TV companies as they see people abandoning TV.
Now is a good time to get rid of the TV.
m10
The government doesn't care if you buy a digital TV.
They want the spectrum, and frankly carrying dead weight for some dinosaur broadcast stations is a waste of time. If they don't have a strategy for switching to digital broadcasting, then away they go. Too bad, so sad, welcome to the business world.
Viewership declines because the content sucks compared to other sources (movies, cable, Internet, etc.). That's the long and the short of it. People who can't afford cable aren't going to have any measurable impact on that.
really?
I thought basic economics and government courses were requisites in public schools these days.
Of course, TANSTAAFL. The national government will be taking tax dollars from people, taking an administrative cut, then turning around and giving it back to pay exclusively for converter boxes. The net effect is the US national government is screwing with free markets and funding (mostly overseas) consumer electronics companies.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It totally sucks that the government regulates things! Air traffic control? Psh. Waste of money. A road system that ensures transcontinental travel is always possible? Where did they get THAT power? Long distance electric transmission lines? Let the flooded cities do without power! They can just rebuild their shit--without power!
Christ.
You act like designating sections of the spectrum for certain uses, which is in EVERYONE'S benefit, is some arbitrary intrusion into your bedroom. Digital cameras don't transmit high power EM energy across dozens of square miles.
The difference is that analog and digital photographs can coexist in the same world rather easily. The main reason that the government is pushing the switch to digital TV is spectrum conservation. Since DTV uses less radio spectrum than analog, we can have the same number of channels taking up less space, which allows for the big 700 MHz spectrum auction that we've been hearing about (and that Google is interested in).
HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I EAT COOKIES
Now we're having digital TV rammed down our throats. This time with the help of the government. TV and electronic shops are jumping for joy, and of course the cable companies are rubbing their hands in glee. The poor consumer is having to buy lots of new equipment and most likely a more expensive cable subscription too.
Here in Switzerland the switch over well under way. Terrestrial (air) broadcast of analog signals has stopped, and the cable companies are switching over too. The technique to 'encourage' their customers to switch to digital is to silently remove more and more of the non-major channels from the analog offering, while offering balkanized digital 'packages' that end up a higher monthly cost if you want to duplicate the same selection channels you had before.
To the yuppies and the technically competent this is probably a relatively small inconvenience. But I wonder about the poor and older generation, who are essentially having a perfectly acceptable analog service taken away from them.
Compare the introduction of digital TV with that of color TV. Color TV was introduced in the early 60s and you could still use and buy new black and white TVs well into 80s. While I'm not asking for a backwards compatibility, I would appreciate it if a similarly long switch over period would be given.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
More confirmation from here in Sweden which only has digital TV transmissions now. A basic set-top box with analog out costs less than $50... without any subsidies.
Erm, you misunderstood. You don't need a "digital" TV as in LCD or Plasma. Any old CRT will do. You'll just need a receiver that's capable of receiving digital television, since the analog one that's built into most old TVs won't work anymore. These are available in any store that sells electronics for a few bucks. Here's a cheap one from Amazon.
I spoke to a couple of my older relatives who were under the impression that everyone had to buy an HDTV because of this switch to digital. I think they were fed this idea by TV salespeople. If that's true, it's dishonest way to sell TVs to people who don't understand the technology.
That's because you think it is for the benefit of television viewers, or even broadcasters. It is not. They simply want the spectrum that these broadcasts are currently going out on back, with their relatively long wavelengths, for things like cellular service or long-range (municipal?) wireless networks.
With the way both of these services are growing, I happen to think it's a good idea for a relatively small cost.
At least with an analog tv if you have a crappy antenna you get some snow or other interference and the program is still watchable. With Digital TV you get big pixel blocks and sound cut-out that makes the program completely unbearable to watch. That's progress for ya.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm seeing alot of people throughing around high prices for TVs. First of all poor people can have TVs too, they may be 10 year old TVs but TVs none the less, TV sets are so commonplace there more or less free, if your not looking for anything fancy. Besides if all those media companies want there customers to keep watching why don't they just send them free converter boxes.
Picture quality improves... content degrades.
Who will be voted off the Island? As long as you keep watching, you are on the Island.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
"in the UK a lot of houses need upgraded aerials to receive digital TV and digital radio - is the cost of fitting these going to be met by the government / tax payers?"
Sort of, but not quite. The government and broadcasters aren't going to pay to upgrade anyone's home antenna but they are going to increase the power of the digital transmissions when the analogue ones have been turned off, so the problem will just go away.
The fear was that digital transmitters might have caused interference to the existing analogue service so they were all made low power, but with analogue gone that's no longer an issue.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Why should you have to pay anything at all for television? How is it that we as a nation became convinced that we should pay for television? Something that was once totally free (except for the price of a tv), now has a charge attached to it. If you ask me, it's not the people in rural areas who watch analog tv that are the stupid ones. It's all of us who drank the kool-aid.
And it's even better than that, because the digital signal can be used on adjacent channels. With the exception of 6-7 and 13-14, how many analog stations in your area are on adjacent channel numbers? Ever wonder why? Because analog needs channel separation.
Right now I can tell you that there probably ARE adjacent channels in your area, you just don't know about them because they're in digital, and even if you can receive them, they tell your TV set to show a different channel number.
So we lose 25% of the channels to the spectrum auction, but can use twice as many of the ones that are left. (That's not exactly true, because 2-6 are apparently not good for digital, so we lose a bit more than 25%.) Digital is also better about geographic distance between transmitters on the same channel.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Though I do challenge the grandparent to give us a station which isn't broadcasting in digital presently. I don't disbelieve there are some, I just don't know of any.
For example, let's say some yokle lives 300 miles from the nearest town and it's costly to lay down a phones for sub 20 people. We don't say tough shit, we all shoulder the burden.
Don't get me wrong, I welcome the change. The analog spectrum was a huge mess for a long while. I welcome mass produced digital tuners and the possibility of cheaper 1080/720 tvs.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Of course, there's STILL nothing worth watching. Bah! Humbug!
I'd don't know about the US, but here in the UK the digital signals are very weak. It's virtually impossible to get good reception with an indoor aerial and I have tried lots of different types. So is this going to be the end of portable televisions?
For those that use rabbit ears or some other antenna you get a nice clear picture without all the snow or ghosting. Sounds good to me.
It doesn't matter what you have, because this isn't affecting any kind of pay TV. This only affects the old-fashioned terrestrial channels you can get for free by putting up a set of rabbit ears.
Chris Mattern
Wasn't that something they had back in the late Twentieth Century? You know, before Bit Torrent and the Internet?
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Good one. That's DVB-T. It won't work here. We use ATSC in the US.
Wikipedia says that Finland switched off analogue TV on 1 September 2007. I guess everyone there is aware of it.
Were we ever. The switchover to digital was very much promoted over the preceding few years. We certainly didn't have anyone asking "what, we went digital and no one told me?"... =)
Instead we got quite a few irate but informed people who quit paying for the TV licence because the DVB-T reception sucked where they were living. (The remote areas are always a pain to deal with...) The Finnish national broadcasting company, YLE, gets its funding through the licence fees and was stung pretty badly by the whole affair.
Step 1) Create legislation to get rid of low-def TV to get funding from the tech industry
Step 2) Face political backlash from the masses when the TV "stops working"
Step 3) Fund yet another huge government handout to make the TV "start working" again
Step 4) Run your next campaign on how you "saved TV"
Step 5) Profit
There are just so many, wonderful things wrong with this situation, I find it hard to begin.
The Constitution of the United States granted precious few responsibilities for the federal government. Can someone name me one non-trivial aspect of our lives that isn't now covered at the federal level? Because I can't think of an example.
The longer I live, the more I become disillusioned with the two-party-is-actually-one-party system we have, so I've changed my position. I'm now voting for the libertarian, the independent, and the unknown, in that order. Call it "wasting my vote" if you'd like, but I'll be here when the rest of you come around.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Probably what will happen, instead of snowing and ghosting, it wont come in at all. The digital signals may be far less tolerant of interference, especially with all that encryption. An analog signal, if you pick up distant signals you can at least get something, with dtv you probably wont get anything. The only thing you might get is strong local stations just around the block. Am i wrong? Someone correct me if so.
1) People find out in their newspaper their tv wont work after next year
2) They get the tv converter box for $50
3) They continue to watch tv on their 20 year old RCA set with their new fangled box
4) They tell all their friends about how they are able to get 30 channels of digital tv for free!
5) Lifeline cable customers cancel their packages because they get a better picture from OTA digital than from 10 channel cable
6) life goes on
Sorry to disagree but I am unable to receive digital TV through my aerial at all. And I'm not alone.
The map at the apparently reputable http://www.wolfbane.com/articles/ukdcmap.htm shows most areas of the country require an amplified extra hi-gain aerial (as of April 2007). The areas that require just a set-top aerial are very small so you're probably just lucky.
The Freeview postcode checker at http://www.freeview.co.uk/ tells me that I won't receive channels until 2012.
When that happens I will also probably have to upgrade to a wideband aerial (as will most houses in most areas that do not receive their signal from Crystal Palace).
And here's the problem: I never asked for digital, I can say with confidence that most people didn't - but now I have to put up with extra costs and hassle, AND paying a TV licence that funds BBC channels I can't watch until 2012. Hooray! Who asked them to do this? I'd rather pay for more police on the streets, etc, etc. OR how about universal broadband?
Americans are ignorant about technology?! Stop the presses, wake the neighbors, and kill the dog. Damn, this is news.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
My MythTV box with an internal antenna is about 40 miles from the transmitters and there can be issues. I'm not that far from a flight path and planes can cause a streak of pixel loss. Maybe you haven't seen Comcast's "Dump the Dish" campaign. We also have a woods nearby and heavy wind and precipitation have had me dialing back to the "SD" channel on rare occasion to avoid breakup -- presumably from scatter. A _really_ cool and weird drop out is when a heavy storm is causing the sat link at the station to break up _too_ and my box is already having trouble getting a lock.
Just saying. On balance, it's fantastic compared to analog rabbit ears. Just not perfect. And since we've never had cable and don't want it, we're happy and hope broadcast never goes away.
You sadly are not wrong. I can't get PBS digitally while I can get it analoglly (is that a word?)...
Yes, do without TV. I thought this was an outrageous notion myself, until I did it.
For me there were numerous benefits:
1. I had more free time, that I never even realized I was spending. Sometimes *five or six hours*, or even more.
2. I quit smoking. Because I wasn't sitting idly, I stopped chain-smoking. Almost by accident.
3. ROOM! I needed room for a grand piano in my house, but never thought I had it. The space occupied by a TV screen, together with the line-of-sight and the seating, is a *huge* investment of real estate. Get rid of it and re-think your room arrangement. You might have ten square meters you never considered before.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
If only there were a way to let these people know. Perhaps, they could insert some kind of announcement into the middle of the television programs.
RadioShack, Best Buy, Circuit City, Kmart, Sam's Club, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart are the big retailers on line to provide these. The pricing is to be between $60 and $70, with a federal government credit of $40 available (limit 2 per household.)
Well then around 2002 I was home over spring break, watching HD and suddenly they just went blank. They were gone. We had no idea why, I went back to school, and he was busy on other things and had dropped his subscription down to the basics because there were only a few HD channels.
In 2004 I got a job that required a lot of travel. Instead of paying $800 a month for an apartment that I spent maybe 6 days a month in, I just put most of my crap in storage and left my electronics at my dad's house. If I had to be at the coporate office (in the same city as my dad lived in), I just stayed there. He decide that since there was more of an HD line up, and we had all the equipment, it was time to go back to an HD package. (Plus it was baseball time.)
Well come to find out, what caused the HD feed to go blank was all of a sudden Dish required a new module for their Model 6000 reciever. As far as we could tell, this wasn't something that was announced. It just happened. The module was $100. We were early adopters and paid about $600 for the damned box to start with. Since we had been a loyal customer for so many years, they sent out the module free after he complained. Plugged it in, and the first commercial we saw on the HD demo channels was, "If you own a model 6000 receiver you will need to call to get this module". Talk about f(*#ing irony.
The receiver finally died last year and they sent a free upgrade, yada, yada. However his big deal now is that he can't bundle services because he's an existing customer. So he's switching to cable at the end of the year, getting the $120 a month HD/HSI bundle and then next year will play the game again going back to a Dish/Phone/DSL combo.
Over the air isn't an option. The reason we first got cable back in the Early 1980's (I was the first kid in the class to have cable back when there was few if no commericals) was that the house is situated where we can't get jack. (Point the antenna in one direction, you get NBC clear, ABC's a little fuzzy, and PBS is there after dark. Point it 45 degrees to the south and you get WB & CBS with a lot of fuzz.
Anyway, our little HD story.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I'm one of the 4 people in America that still use rabbit ears for my television. I'm about 30 miles from the nearest tower (CBS) and about 50-60 miles from the next nearest towers (Fox, ABC, and NBC). When I bought my HDTV I was shocked by how many digital feeds I picked up with a rabbit ear antennae with an amp on it. They're very finicky in the weather but no more than the analog feeds. My biggest annoyance is digital audio. It gets really choppy when the analog audio still comes in just fine. Also for some reason ABC (and only ABC out of the 4) will sometimes seem to look fine but the audio and video will be out of synch. Other than that, when the analog feed is bad the digital feed is usually ok. If I had to drop one or the other, I'd probably drop the analog.
Many people have small, battery-powered analog TVs as part of their emergency gear. I bet a lot of people will forget about those. Maybe one station in each area should be subsidized to keep analog broadcast equipment functional, for use in emergencies.
Question to all: are the digital transmissions still in the same bandspace as their analog counterparts? I'm near the edge of my cable's 'market' and watch several UHF stations that aren't must-carrys on my cable system - and I'm hoping that I'll still be able to use my current antenna/rotor/amplifier with a converter box after the change.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
I feel your pain, but more often than not those movies were 2.35:1 (analog was 4:3 or 1.33:1, HDTV is 16:9 or 1.78:1). 16:9 is a pretty reasonable compromise.
Look at it this way; TV shows were 33% wider than their height while movies were and are up to 135% wider than their height (going back to the 70's I believe). HDTV at 16:9 is 78% wider and that seems a fair deal.
I've tried to use OTA DTV for the past two years. Usually it's great, but the signal dies in even marginal weather (the so-called "digital cliff"). I live within 15 miles of the broadcast towers. I've tried powered, directional antennas and mapped out the best orientation for each signal. I've tried outside antennas in different places. Nothing has helped. From what I've read, the only solution is to erect an antenna taller than the nearby trees -- and that's still no guarantee.
Analog TV has always been the old reliable standby. Crouched in the basement with tornado sirens blaring, you could always get a fuzzy picture with reasonable audio even if you were 50 miles from a broadcast tower.
Who is looking out for the public interest? What about the 22 million people relying on analog OTA as their primary television reception? What about the 28 million digital satellite subscribers who use analog OTA as a backup when their satellite signals go down?
The biggest proponents of the digital OTA change seem to be...
- digerati who don't use or care about analog OTA and who are drooling over the prospects of spectrum reuse
- government who has already spent the revenue from the spectrum auction
- the cable companies, who see this as a windfall (buy cable stock if you can; 2009 will be their best year ever)
I find it ironic that the analog OTA retirement is snuggly wrapped in a blanket of post-9/11 patriotism since some of reclaimed spectrum will be used for emergency communications. In fact, analog OTA retirement will shutter the most successful and widely-used emergency broadcast mechanism history has ever seen.Maybe if every member of congress should be forced to switch to digital OTA....