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.'"

Comments

A Dark Art With No Margin For Error

[carlhirsch]

I've been monkeying with OTA HD in Chicago for a couple of months now. I'm very close to downtown, meaning I get strong signals from the transmitters on the Sears Tower and the Hancock.

I'm absolutely delighted that I'm no longer paying $100 a month for cable from Comcast. I've got an RSS feed from TVTorrents that brings me The Daily Show, Colbert, and Mad Men That's really all I need, and in a pinch I'd consider purchasing them through iTunes. I mostly watch PBS and the subchannels are real nice.

The thing is, it's a dark art getting all the major channels coming in at once. And with HD, if there's signal problems, you don't just get some fuzz, you lose your connection entirely. If a connection is marginal, you get artifacting, stuttering, and audio drops, producing something that's just unwatchable. I suspect that lots of folks in the Wilmington test were getting by with marginal signals, and they're now SOL.

That said, Vista Media Center with TV Pack 2008 is a hell of a DVR setup.