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US Switch To DTV Countdown Begins
s31523 writes "In February lawmakers postponed the switch from analog to digital TV. Now, the new June 12th deadline is upon us with no sign of another delay. CNET is reporting that the President himself has stated, '... I want to be clear: there will not be another delay.' So it looks like it is going to happen, for real this time. Even with the delay, there are still estimated to be millions of unprepared viewers. Local stations may participate in the voluntary 'Analog nightlight' services in which TV stations agree to keep an analog signal turned on in addition to their digital signals to provide information about the DTV transition and to notify unprepared TV viewers of emergencies, such as hurricanes."
I'm not afraid of the switch tomorrow. I've already spent the last few months getting repeated phone calls from my grandma complaining about the funny new box we put on her TV so she can still get her damn Judge Judy.
The last one was the best. Grandma called up and informed me that her new remote was broken. So I called my cousin, who drives over to her house and finds that the "broken" remote is the result of grandma having put a fucking doily on top of the box (blocking its IR receiver). I shit you not.
I love my HDTV. But it's a demanding love.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What... you thought "February" was too easy to pronounce correctly?
I thought that with the transition, the old analog frequencies were being reclaimed. Some of the ATSC stations will change frequencies and broadcast digital where the analog used to be. So are they delaying the completion of the transition to allow for this nightlight service? When will we have our stations at their final frequencies?
"We have worked hand in hand with state and local officials, broadcasters and community groups to educate and assist millions of Americans with the transition...I want to be clear: there will not be another delay."
Well, I hope my government is this vocal and helpful in getting everyone coordinated to switch to IPv6 and HTML5. Oh, ha, that's right. If we switch to those, the government doesn't get to auction off IPv4 or HTML4 for twenty billion dollars. So I guess you only get grade A support from the FCC and Department of Commerce only when they profit from it. That's really a shame, I think if the United States informed consumers on more standards and compliance it would benefit the average citizen. Hell, sometimes I wish the Senators & Congressmen themselves sought such information.
My work here is dung.
Anybody got a timeline, of the original planned switchover date, then the first delay to when, second delay to when, etc.?
I've changed over to digital torrent distribution, freeing up the airwaves completely.
It's about damn time. I have thrown away old HDTVs already!
the President himself has stated, '... I want to be clear: there will not be another delay.' So it looks like it is going to happen
Yeah, because the President always does what he says he's going to do
/rollseyes
If someone hasn't figured out they need to pick up a DTV tuner, and gone out and obtained one by now, but they can sit there and watch the static. There has been AMPLE warning that this was coming, so even stupidity and laziness wont cut it for an excuse.
I gotta say I think its bullshit people with older tvs have to either buy a new tv or a conversion box. The Gov. should be giving out the conversion boxes for free.
Digital backslide
A friend who uses an indoor antenna bought a digital TV, and now only has four stations, two in analog, one of which is a Catholic religion station, and two in digital.
I fear this will happen to cable subscribers too after the loss of Channel 8 [see "Channel 8 goes blank for some WSEC viewers," by Amanda Robert, IT, April 23]. I can see channels going digital one by one until there are no analog signals left.
I was using an indoor antenna (before the digital switch). If I remember correctly, I had channels 12, 17, 19, 20, 28, 48 and 55. Now it seems that in the digital age, digital TV users have only two stations.
Welcome back to 1955 St. Louis!
Free Martian Whores!
REPENT! Repent ye geeky sinners! For the end of days is upon ye!
Lo! As it is written, there shall befall a great and terrible calamity upon all the kin of the nerdy, and their most precious gadgets and devices shall be laid low by the machinations of the wicked! And they shall lament, and make agitated phone calls even in the early hours of the late morning!
And there shall be a great moaning as the geeky rise to diagnose the woes of their parents and uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors and co-workers and friends and even children! Naught will your warnings save you as the wretched shall pay no need. And ye shall be swamped with piteous wails and whinges as the masses of humanity beat down thy doors and fill up they inboxes with useless protestations and opinions and heed not thy councils.
Thou shalt spend thy last days overseeing the procurement and installation of countless digital devices. Yea, in peoples very living rooms! And thou shalt be condemned to maintain and provide unpaid support for each and every one of these cheap and buggy imports till the end of thy unhappy life.
Repent geeky sinners! Give up thy sinful social ways and cast off thy connections to society, like the mathematicians and programmers of old! Give up thy internet and telephone connections and families and social life! Give up and repent, lest ye be danmed! REPENT!
May the Maths Be with you!
This is one small step for man.....one giant leap fo0001111001111111010111011110011100111001111011100111011111...
As the internet and the sat TV is altrady here.
And personally don't mind about TV: books are better by far. And they can be both digital and analogue at the same time.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
The other thing is at least you can watch fuzzy analog TV. With Digital either you have it or you don't. Kind of like Direct TV or Dish in the rain. Woot less channels I can watch!!! Plus now that I am out in the country... no high speed internet. Glad we killed that "pork" project
The only way to get the masses to switch is to force it upon them. Hence the continuing popularity of Windows XP.
Curiously, an FM radio station I'd like to listen to says they'll be able to throttle up the power once NTSC station WTVR channel 6 in Richmond goes silent.
I don't know what rule is limiting their transmission on 89.5 MHz due to interference with TV channel 6 (82-88 MHz, with the video carrier on 83.25 MHz and the audio carrier on 87.75 MHz).
I suppose it's an IF thing, but I can't figure out how 10.7 MHz or 45 MHz fits in there.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
The article says that Congress has spent $2 billion on transition and "public education" efforts. Yet 2.5 million people were not given $40 vouchers because "money ran dry"? So you spend $2 billion telling people to get a converter, but won't spend another $100 million so that people can actually afford a converter? Brilliant? Oh right, those billions went into some politicians' pockets, not anywhere near the consumers...
No more TV! So much free time! Thank you, government!
When the reception is good the new over the air DTV picture is way better than analog though often there is a noticable delay between the visual and the audio tracks. This is annoying. You see the mouth move then hear the words a tenth of a second too late. When the reception is bad, DTV degrades poorly and you see ghosts and block people moving around. This is annoying. Analog tv seemed to degrade in a nicer and recover faster as well. Losing a signal on DTV is like the DVDs when your watching a movie and it gets stuck and there is no way to advance the tracking. Then a blue screen comes up and says "Bad or no Signal".
I wonder what seeing block people does to your animus psyche/subconscious. You could be watching the news and just then the foxy weather lady looks like a new T4 with a hole in her body. It is mildly uncomfortable to watch more so than the analog.
This move to DTV is surely going to be a boon for the providers of paid tv. And as an old time cynical /.er, I would be interested to see if there is a tidy correlation between cable provider profits and over the air DTV complaints...
--A future cable subscriber.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
in austin, I have only lost one station in the transition, a spanish language channel that was very weak in analog. I get 6 digitals. (FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC, WB & PBS). The nice thing for me is one of the stations broadcasts weather on a 2nd channel, so I get a radar 24/7, which lets me see where it is raining. For me, its all a plus to switch to digital. Much cleaner signal and HD. the only negative has been slower channel surfing since signal acquisition is slower. This is all with indoor rabbit ears (like 12 bucks).
I don't actually watch much TV but I switched my old TV to Digital over-the-air TV a while back.
Over all I am happy with it, the pictures are sharp and clear and once I got a proper antenna set up it worked with few "drop outs".
Getting an antenna set up isn't easy though. What is being transmitted may be digital but the air waves will always be analog. Too little signal strength and the signal can not be displayed at all. Too much strength and the receiver may apparently be "deafened" by it and also not able to display it. Problems such as signal echoes and RF interference are still there but no longer directly visible.
Those little old VHF "bunny ears" with a UHF hoop antennas likely won't quite cut it for most people unless they live close to the station. A good directional indoor antenna will work much better. Further out, of course people will need larger outdoor UHF optimized antennas. Unfortunately there are some stations what will still be transmitting on VHF.
And it is important to watch out for RF interference. Digital TV boxes contain high speed digital electronics that can actually interfere with its own operation. And most newer power supplies (wall-warts) are "switched" power supplies and can also create RF interference.
But once set up, it is completely worth not having to pay for cable.
Heck, if anybody knows anybody who uses analog over-the-air TV and hasn't gotten hooked up yet, help them out so they don't think they have to run out and pour their wallets out to Comcrapst!
A friend who uses an indoor antenna bought a digital TV, and now only has four stations, two in analog, one of which is a Catholic religion station, and two in digital.
Which is exactly why the switch is so important, because a lot of stations broadcast at much lower power than they will be able to after the switch.
He'll get more channels after the 12th if they don't wimp out again.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your post just sparked a thought:
would it be possible to do TVs that at all times have tuned into one channel above and one below the one you are currently watching?
This would enable typical "channel hopping" behaviour, because you could instantly switch to the next channel, and the time it takes to see what's on it and decide to move on (about 1 second) should be enough to acquire the next channel, and so on. Then people could continue to channel swap and the economy would not asplode from lack of sale of sofas and beer etc.
My mother lives in south central WY along the I-80 corridor, and the only station (repeater) in the area is 60 miles away. Her signal comes in loud and clear.
Of course there are no large trees, only thing that could effect the signal would be the terrain which is extremely variable.
If the station is going to be broadcasting a "How to switch to DTV" Message, what are the odds someone will be watching it all day long and actually be watching when an emergency broadcast is sent? Slim 2 None.
Tonight I will be watching tv on my TurboGrafx-16 TurboExpress until midnight, after that it will be worthless. Granted it will probably use 8 batteries a hour to do it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboExpress
A person we can't work out exactly whether we're watching or not but can make a reasonable judgement about how much they're watching?
Here in Canada the deadline is 31 August 2011. There are a few digital transmitters on the air in major cities. Here in Vancouver I get CBC, CTV and Global on digital, plus KVOS (independent) and KBCB (home shopping - ugh!) from Bellingham, Washington. Set-top ATSC converters are not available here, so I bought one at Radio Shack in Portland last fall and hooked it up to my trusty multi-system TV.
Even dumbed down to 480i NTSC, the picture quality is better than DVD. The CBC HD signal shows what digital can do: being less heavily compressed it's better than what you get on cable. None of the other local channels have gone digital yet.
KVOS and KBCB pulled the NTSC plug in February. Their old analogue channels have been dead air ever since.
The Canadian broadcasters are dragging their heels, pleading poverty and the end of civilization as we know it. Nothing new there.
The cable companies have the general populace snowed in to believing that you must have cable to get any TV at all. Nothing new there, either.
...laura
Want to motivate everyone to pick up their converter box? They should have mandated this back when they delayed the switch the first time:
Most of the broadcasters have half hour "How To Switch" public service programs. The FCC should have mandated that, in March, they pre-empt 25% of their analog programming with one of these programs. In April, 50%, in May, 75%, and by June, analog channels were to carry nothing but the DTV PSAs, or emergency broadcasts when necessary, 24 hours a day. Even worse, let the soap opera run for 5 minutes and then break in with "an important announcement concerning your television service". I'll bet that most people will run out and pick up a converter within days of the 50% threshold.
I never did figure out why they simulcast the 'How to switch' PSAs on their digital channels. All they'd need is a reminder to rescan your converter after June 12th. And put that up full time on the UHF channels on June 12th for a week or so.
Have gnu, will travel.
I did a load of clothes at the local laundromat last night, and enjoyed a episode of the New Twilight Zone (which I guess is itself pretty old now) as my unmentionables tumbled in the dryer. The TV, perched precariously atop a non-functional pop machine, was older than my kids. The signal was fuzzy, and I believe the "antenna" was a brown extension cord, ends stripped and screwed into the old 300-ohm input. Most of the time the color dropped out, leaving the New Twilight Zone looking oddly like the Old Twilight Zone.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched a static-y news broadcast at the local barber shop. His TV was equipped with a newfangled set of rabbit ears of much more recent vintage, maybe 10 years old or even newer.
Tomorrow, both locations will almost certainly dish up nothing but that "analog nightlight". And even if the owners get a fancy new box -- not likely at the laundromat, and not terribly certain at the barber shop -- it won't help. The metal in the washers and dryers will probably futz up the digital signal beyond repair. At the barber shop, every time he turns on the clippers -- instead of just getting a little fuzzy, the screen will likely go blank.
It should be an interesting day.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
there are still millions of estimated viewers that are unprepared
For what it's worth, some of us just don't give a fuck about broadcast TV and are looking forward to our signals being cut off. There're always Hulu and torrents, not to mention DVD rentals. So... don't forget about all two of us who aren't "unprepared," but are in fact awaiting a time when we won't be able to receive broadcast video! Vive la revolution!
I am psyched! My wife and I were getting Direct TV until a few weeks ago. We recently got a new TV and tried to tune into the digital channels over the air and were pleasantly surprised. In fact, the increased quality of the network channels for free prompted me to cancel our basic cable (well, dish really) package instead of paying MORE to "upgrade" HD cable.
I figure why pay pay to watch commercials when I can get them in HD for free?
The cable company was a little disappointed, but they can go die. I can't believe they expected me to pay MORE money to upgrade to HD digital service when low rez analog service was going away anyway.
The best part is that you get to keep the dish on the roof! Bonus!
Could we get going on the switch to the metric system now please? It would require about the same amount of effort and consumer education. Yards, acres, miles, feet - come on people, this is not the 1800s.
If you are in LA, feel free to drop by Machine Project on Friday June 12th at 10pm for a talk by Jason Torchinsky about mechanical televisions, to be followed by a midnight countdown to the demise of analog TV. In memoriam of the TVs we all have known and loved/hated, we'll be gathering a pyramid of old TVs together for a countdown as they go to static. Please join us, and if you promise to bring it home with you afterwards, bring a TV for the pyramid.
Farewell to Analog TV at Machine Project, Echo Park.
People who haven't yet got a box that is subsidized with a $40 government voucher are too poor or lazy to be valuable consumers. They're probably so poor they don't even pay taxes. Why spend millions upon millions of tax dollars to bring these bottom-of-the-barrel consumers to advertisers when they can't even afford the nearly-free converter? It's not worth it. The overall quality of audiences will be improved for advertisers if we just leave these last few millions of poor people behind.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I did a lot of research on this last year. For what it's worth, I'll offer a few thoughts from what I remember.
First, get an antenna that can handle both UHF and VHF. Some stations will still broadcast on VHF. Ignore ridiculous marketing claims that an antenna is "digitally optimised" or "HDTV ready" or however that went. A signal is a signal. Having said that, from reports, some "UHF-only" indoor/outdoor antennas will actually do okay with VHF signals as well. I wish I'd known that last fact before buying a honking big outdoor VHF/UHF antenna. The "UHF-only" antennas take way less room. In any case, find out where the stations are located physically, and point the antenna at them. If they're dispersed, you may need a motor control to rotate the antenna, which is a pain, or multiple antennas, which is a big pain.
When I finally bothered to hook up the analog/digital conversion box for more than brief testing, and a freaking huge outdoor VHF/UHF antenna *inside* my apartment (it's mounted on a short brass rod stuck in a hole drilled into the end of a two-by-four stub mounted on a large homemade work table, so that it's up near the ceiling), I got channels 8 (CBS), 10-1 (NBC), 10-2 (NBC), 13-1 (ABC), 13-2 (ABC), 21-1 (PBS), 21-2 (PBS), 21-3 (PBS), and 31 (Fox). This is four more channels than for analog. However, channels 8 and 13-1/13-2 are basically unwatchable, with signal levels too low. The picture constantly jerks and pixellates. I hoping those stations jack up the freaking power soon. There are some okay shows on 13-2, in particular. If not, screw it. If they don't care enough, why should I? I watch a lot of DVDs, and there are more okay films on DVD than I can realistically watch in a lifetime, even with only watching each film *once*.
Second, don't get the absolute cheapest converter box. It'll likely have serious problems unless you get fairly lucky, such as sometimes severe audio lag, poor handling of marginal signals, a poor feature set, a tendency to fail early, etc. I ended up paying about $23 per box after taxes, for the ones I bought with the two $40 off coupons sent by the government. If you're interested, these were the Zenith DTT-901 model, May 2008 firmware. One feature I liked was "pass-through", but that obviously will make no difference very soon. I'm not up to speed on current models. Look on video fanatic forums. Odds are good you'll find a decent brand and model for little money. I can't remember if any $40 off coupons are still good, but if they are and you have them, use them for two copies of the same model, so you'll have one on hand while the other is in the shop, if needed. Worst comes to the worst, you can sell the extra copy or give it to a relation.
If you're having trouble with elderly relations, tell them that the little box is a bully and that it has taken over the channel switching. It may sound a bit condescending, but if it works, why not? It's a clearer visual image for them than the obscurity of technical details. Be sure the remotes for them have large buttons and are as simple as possible. Keep the "good" remotes in a drawer, for when you need them to set up stuff. I use myself a nice Sony programmable remote, and it works well, but even I have a bit of trouble sometimes with flipping from one mode to another, whilst managing for example overlapping sound level controls (mainly when playing DVDs that seem to flip a coin when it comes to loudness). Asking elderly relations to cope with this kind of remote fiddliness will be too much if they already have trouble with the DTV changeover with which to begin. It will cause active pain (to you), but discard *everything* except power and start/stop (for DVDs if applicable) and volume and channels for your kindly but dumb elders. If you're daring, explain the fast forward button. One hopes that doesn't overlook anything!
(Yeah, I know about TV Fool and such, but that's been covered in vast detail elsewhere, and I forgot most of it anyway, heh-heh!)
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
If God wanted Digital, he would not have
made our brains Analog.
Digital is just a passing New Age fad.
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
Within the last few weeks the local Comcast moved 40 of their sub-100 channels to digital-only. Probably more so they can do switched delivery than because of the DTV transition (broadcast channels etc. are still being fed in analog). But it screwed with the recordings on my dual-tuner Tivo for weeks until I manually updated all of them to "box" from "cbl" -- annoyingly, cutting them out from the benefits of dual-tuner in the first place. :P
So long, electromechanical television reception, you go into the pile with analog magnetic video storage and analog plastic audio storage. Analog radio reception, you're not looking too good...
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
No matter how much they try, the US can't mandate anything to do with the internet, because it doesn't own the internet. You can tell everybody in the US to switch to IPV6, but that isn't going to make everyone else in the world immediately comply. Same as a shutting down internet gambling. You can shut down the US based ones, but you can't shut down offshore ones.
All he said was "coordinate" and you make it sound like he wants the government holding a fucking gun to everyone's head.
And my second coupon expired yesterday!
Yeah, well, sorry about that. I'll be sure to seed the page with new and interesting errors to spot ;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Is this The Final Countdown?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
So the switch really isnt a switch after all.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Your cable/dish/sat goes out when it rains and you cant get weather updates? Well, thats why we have radio.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Our household is planning to just let the TV go dark. The only TV in the house that still works is older than me (it's a set from the early 1980s), and it hardly ever gets used---the computers in the house displaced the TV a long time ago. I suppose we count in the millions of unprepared consumers, but frankly, TV isn't worth $40 and the time it takes to set up the converter box.
During a weather emergency, the TV not the first place I go
Unless you're driving, analog TV is (was) the best place to go for weather emergency info because:
for relevant information. Noaa.gov, weather.com, and/or a local AM "News and weather station" are my collective first choice.
Static on analog AM (455-1600kHz) can tell you a thunderstorm is 50-100 miles away. Beyond that I'd say analog AM and FM radio is all but useless. The news cycles are too long, there are too many clear channel and autoDJ and syndicated stations. (I've been there, camping at 4:00a.m., emergency sirens come on, I scan the radio dial for information and here 1940s music, Art Bell, Industrial music and static...)
NOAA transmitters are typical of heavy government, by time a weather event is verified enough to get into the update cycle, it has probably passed you. NOAA transmitters are pathetically weak and placed in locations where their line of sight coverage is abysmal. Cross any great lake and you're likely to pick up TV stations the whole way across but you won't pick up any NOAA station more than 10 miles offshore. (In my case not even this far because the nearest station was about 15 miles inland!) Try this, get one of those TV/weather radios (before tomorrow morning!) scan through the T.V. channels and if you are within 25 miles of a big city, you'll probably get some TV stations and if you hear a NOAA station at all, it will be very weak.
Now here is the rub, not only is digital TV an all or nothing affair which has a wider area of 'perfect picture', but a much smaller area of 'usable picture', but to date there are no portable battery operated televisions capable of receiving a DTV signal. Yes you could run your DTV converter off an inverter, and someone has even created one which runs on half a dozen D batteries, but DTV decoding is computationally intensive which means it burns through batteries much faster than your Analog LCD TV. Gaps in weather and other emergency coverage will eventually be seen as one of the unintended consequences of the government mandated forced obsolescence of analog TV. A second unintended consequence is that millions of TVs will end up in landfills before their time because their owner is either out of DTV range, or he isn't technically savvy enough to hook up a converter. The third unintended consequence is that themanufacturers of new televisions will have a very good year. DTV was sold in the pre-internet days on the premise that it would provide jobs for EEs after the downsizing of NASA and the military. It has provided jobs, but unfortunately very few of these jobs have been within the U.S. And now we're stuck with "the worlds first DTV system" which was designed when MS Windows didn't even have a TCP stack and the 'web' consisted of a few dozen organizations, email and usenet. My point here being that after all of the money spent on DTV, it is within 5 years of being irrelevant thanks to youtube and similar video services and more efficient codecs.
Due to the anti-ghosting features (or maybe multipath rejection) the current standard is unusable in a car/fast moving vehicle. There is an update to the standard to aleviate this oversight, but for now, all of those RV drivers /van drivers, and boaters who used broadcast TV will be SOL.
I think to date there are no (or very very few) ATSC capable portable tv's... hopefully someone corrects me, but that spells bad news for folks in hurricane prone areas who could lose power for weeks at a time....
JP
jp
>The only way to get the masses to switch is to force it upon them.
So sayeth Saint Steve, therefor it must be true.
Not true at all. AM News stations do a great job. You may be in an unfortunately poor area for selection.
All good reasons why you have 5 different NOAA stations in any given area... Different rotations, different propagation, etc.
I've been posting links to portable DTVs for idiots like yourself for a good 5 years now. Get the fuck out of Walmart and look around, dammit. A quick web search will find them.
Video (and audio) codecs can't get notably more efficient. MPEG-2 gets surprisingly close to the upper limit of imperceptible lossy compression. No amount of math or hand-waving by non-experts can change the fundamental limit of entropy. All newer codecs can do is make low quality videos not look so artifact-ridden... At HDTV bitrates, they give you slightly more than nothing.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The local CBS channel (WWMT) still only shows the SD downlink instead of the HD one. And last time I watched there were green blocks constantly on the screen. Does anyone know how long they'll keep the SD feeds of these syndicated shows?
Damn. Obviously, different areas of the country are very different! Here in Oklahoma, the NOAA transmitters are in VERY good locations. From my house, I can pick up two or three indoors, on one of my ham radio antennas I can pick up seven or eight from across the state and even into Texas. Just the other day I was in my car listening to the one that is located in the OKC metro area while I was over 100 miles away.
And the updates seem to happen very quickly here. Indeed, I'll hear the NWS discussing something with the spotters over the radio, then within just a few minutes the weather radio goes off with the new updates. If I had any complaints, I wish they would make more fine-grain use of the SAME codes, our storms aren't usually large enough to affect an entire county at once, but even if their alert specifically says "northeast corner of Oklahoma county" I (on the far west side) still get the alert because they only break things down to county level with the codes.
I do agree about using TV during weather events. The one thing I really liked about the switch to DTV was two of the local stations (NBC and ABC) set up a secondary channel that was nothing but weather. They've ruined it a bit already, with advertising and insets and such, but for a while one of them just had a live feed of their radar up with NOAA weather radio audio. I usually just tune to someone who has radar up and turn the audio down, living here all my life I can read the radar about as well as they can for stuff that matters to me, so don't need the chatter.
Well, the bit about SAME didn't make much sense... Yeah, storm systems can often easily affect multiple counties, not just one. I was thinking about a specific event - tornado warnings. They are often quite small in area, frequently including just a small piece of any given county. But everyone in the county gets to hear the warning, and - even better - the municipalities then set off their sirens because the county is in an issued warning.
I've had clear blue skies where a tight, fast-moving storm has already passed over, with tornado sirens sounding because the very far corner of the county was included in a warning area! Unfortunately that makes a lot of people just ignore the sirens and warnings after a while...
Unlike its UK counterpart, which is requiring citizens to pay for digital pay TV adaptors out of their own pockets - despite the fact that they've already shelled out USD250 equiv for a TV licence. And even if you do take out a digital pay TV subscription, the channels all have unremoveable on-screen logos and are constantly interrrupted by red-button messages.
"I never did figure out why they simulcast the 'How to switch' PSAs on their digital channels."
I'm just guessing, but I assume it's because otherwise they'd have to have twice the signal distribution infrastructure upstream from the transmitters (one with the PSA for analog, one with something else for digital). And only for the few months the PSAs are being broadcast. That's a lot of cost they wouldn't want to buy. I don't blame them.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
HDTV is nice, when it works. Schedules generally don't work for me, anywhere. On cable, viewing just works, until they rearrange the QAM channels for some reason as a hint we need to buy another digital cable tuner or my TV loses power and wipes all the stored channels and channel labels.
MS-Media Center (on vista they changed the name to something else)
I long for the day when:
a) MS-Media Center works with my USB HDTV adapter for OTA channels and Clear QAM
b) MS-Media Center actually uses the OTA schedule and Clear QAM
c) I don't need a $200 antenna to receive the same channels I used to get
d) All the extra channels that come in perfectly are g-damn religious channels
Or
e) I could split my cable and the, already existing, amplifier would actually allow my HDTV adapter to tune any channels without disconnecting the TV from the cable too.
Or
f) GB-PVR worked with the OTA schedules
g) MythTV worked with the OTA schedules
I can dream, right?
there are still estimated to be millions of unprepared viewers
Give me a break. If you are still unprepared by now, you deserve to have your TV cut off. Maybe that will get you off the couch to buy a converter. Heck, I live in Canada and finding the converters is a challenge in itself, not to mention the $90 price with no rebate. Yet my whole family managed to get them. Something like 6 households of us.
In cities with a lot of TV stations -- everyone bring an old analog TV to the party. Each TV gets tuned to a different station. As each station blinks out, everyone slams a drink. By midnight, all channels should be gone. By midnight, everyone should be snockered.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Sorry, I was born after 1950, what's analog TV?
Same thing happened here that would have happened if they'd not moved the deadline. In the last 2-3 days I've had to setup 8 of the converter boxes for various family members. They waited until the last minute and would continue to do so for as long as that damned deadline got pushed back.
It's annoying as heck though. One of my great-uncles (89 years old - he's got more money than God stashed away but rarely spends it) called me over to set two of them up. His antenna in one room is ancient (I'm guessing more than 30 years old). It's gets drop outs, but he doesn't understand that the antenna isn't good because he'll get a minute or two of perfect picture so to him "it's picking up good", but he keeps calling me telling me "there's something wrong with it" (ie, drop outs and stuttering). I've already had to drive back over there TWICE just to plug the antenna back into the box because it keeps falling out - the connector is a press on coax but it's on a big "box" about the size of a pack of cigarettes. The weight of that box + the loose connector means that it falls out every time the tv gets bumped. I think I'm just going to buy him a new antenna for my own sanity.
God help me when the power goes out and all those boxes need to be rescanned.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
In Kansas City, most of the local stations all signed off at 9AM.
I thought it fitting that WDAF-TV4 ended their broadcast with
1. a crude "1949-2009" graphic
2. A few seconds of the old indian head test pattern
3. A video of the old stars and stripes video they always used at signoff everyday
Followed by a "ceremony" with some backoffice engineers pushing the big button you aren't supposed to press.