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Complaints Pour In After Digital TV Test
djupedal writes "'Even if all goes smoothly, next February's digital television shift is likely to generate hundreds of thousands of complaints from television viewers around the country.
A major problem during a test run in Wilmington, N.C., was the inability of over-the-air viewers to receive new digital signals, according to figures collected after the test.'"
A converter box won't do any good for the houses that do not receive a strong enough digital signal. RTFA
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Marx had it wrong.
*TV* is the opiate of the masses.
Any my crystal ball says if they turn of the TV,
there will be riots in the streets.
I'll bet the politicians blink (Hi, Sara!) and analog stays on the air.
Indeed. And this has been a problem since cable-TV went main-stream. I remember when cable was new and few people had it. And the more it grew, the poorer over-the-air signal quality became.
You will find the same sort of problem with radio stations as well. They adjust the power output based on the time of day... or hasn't anyone noticed? The power is always boosted during peak driving times and lowered during all other times. In the case of over-the-air television, digital or otherwise, they aren't going to pay for the power unless there is money in it.
Not by a long shot. People who are currently putting up with a snowy picture will find that they are unable to get anything at all after the DTV switch....
Analog TV degrades gracefully. The farther out you get, the worse the picture quality, but you can go right to the deep fringe reception area and still get something even if the quality sucks. With digital TV, once the signal drops below a certain threshold, the error correction is unable to compensate for the degradation, at which point you get a blank screen.
Then, there's the problem of multipath interference. With analog TV, you just get a ringing ghost signal that is still watchable. Unfortunately, the ATSC digital TV standard that the U.S. chose (unlike the standard chosen in Europe) is relatively poor at handling multipath interference. If you have much multipath interference at all, the signal goes away. This is pretty easy to demonstrate by watching an analog signal and a digital signal off a pair of rabbit ears and rotating the antenna....
Finally, there's the problem of encoding. ATSC uses MPEG-2 as its video encoding scheme. Ultimately, I think that will prove to be the greatest flaw in the ATSC standard. Because it uses interframe compression, as soon as you get a tiny bit of signal that can't be decoded, you can lose the signal for up to half a second. (I frames must be transmitted every half second according to the MPEG-2 spec.) Worse, because the audio is muxed with the video, if the video stream can't be properly interpreted, you lose the audio signal, too unlike in analog where audio is the last thing to go....
In short, this was all very predictable and pretty much inevitable due to a combination of poor decisions when designing the standard and the need to greatly increase transmit power to cover the fringe reception areas with enough of a signal to be above the threshold of detection for digital
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I consider myself to be technically competent and quite familiar with video protocols... especially digital video formats and transmission requirements.
I also live in a MSA that has over 140,000 people living in it, even though the Neilson company doesn't consider it big enough for classifying it as an independent television market. Yes, I know that there are markets much smaller than this, but it doesn't matter.
The point is, in spite of the fact that I was able to tune in over 10 television stations with the analog signals... most of them quite clearly... I can't pick up a single digital television channel. That by itself isn't so awful other than the fact that the local analog signal has been shut off... at the beginning of this month (September 1st). The city I live in has "officially" already gone through the transition to digital television. I am serious here too... I can't pick up a single channel that even remotely works.
There are some transmitters in a nearby state (about 60 miles away from where I live) that are still broadcasting an analog signal. However, they are about to turn off that signal in about two weeks. Well, I guess I have a good collection of DVDs that I've been buying over the years, and now that most of the decent television series are going onto DVD as well, I can just buy them instead of watching the broadcast television.
What a way to "save" the television industry!
Yes, I have access to things like DirectTV, cable television networks, and other such nonsense. I have my own reasons for not wanting to access broadcast commercial television in such a manner. The point is that it doesn't work!
Oh... about the silly coupon program for the converter boxes. I asked for a coupon back in June... and it never came. My wife (without letting me know first) requested an additional coupon which finally came.... about a month after the switch to digital television. The converter box is about what I was expecting, basically a piece of cheap consumer junk that is completely incompatible with all of the video equipment I have... other than I guess a television signal can get through. My wife hates the thing even more than I do, but at least the FCC can sit back and feel like they have taken care of a family like mine with such a wonderful "improvement" in the technology.
Yeah, right. Improvement. At least I can still pick up gamma rays from the Big Bang on my old analog television, which is as exciting as watching mud dry.