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DTV Transition - One Year Later
commodore64_love writes "One year has passed since NTSC-analog television died (R.I.P. 6/12/09 — aged 68 years), and the new ATSC-digital television became standard. According to Retrovo, the transition had some successes and failures. Retailers saw this as an opportunity to sell new HDTVs and 46 million converter boxes, while cable providers advertised rates as low as $10/month. One-third of the converter boxes the US subsidized — approximately 600 million dollars worth — were never used by purchasers. Overall 51% of Americans felt the DTV transition was good, while 23% said it was not. 12% of respondents report that since the switch they have worse reception. Others received better reception, gaining 24-hour movie channels, retro channels, foreign programming, and other new networks that had not existed under the old analog system."
The best (read sucky) part are all the perfectly functional, yet completely useless, "old" analog TVs that have been dumped (often illegally) in landfills. I have two that can't even give away.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Me, personally, I think it's great and had to be done. Recently got a tiny DTV to USB tuner (~$20) for my computer and think it's fantastic. No doubt everyone's heard this viewpoint.
But let me relay the experiences of my grandmother who lives in the middle of nowhere mid-west. She didn't get new channels. She didn't get 24 hour movie channels. She didn't get better reception. What she got was yet another box for me to put in the chain between her television and the antenna attached to the pole shed. She now has another remote. Her checklist of things to go through when she wants to program a recording just got one longer as well as things to check when it's not working. And when she records it, she can only do one channel at a time as that's what the DTV box has to be set on since her VCR can't control digital signals. She was already getting analog distortion or static when she recorded her soap operas and I think she had learned to cope with this kind of distortion when viewing them intently. Last I checked up on her she complained that the digital distortion (specifically the audio distortion) was much harder to work through at times as opposed to fuzzy static. The clipping of the voices seems to ruin her enjoyment of a cookie cutter three quarter view emo meltdown between two hams.
So I think a lot of the views you're hearing are people who are connected to the internet and the unspoken voice of someone who has neither the internet nor a cell phone is actually a large consumer of the programs on air wave TV and products advertised on nationally broadcasted programs. Just something to consider, after helping her through this change I would be doubtful that she is alone or unique to her age group.
My work here is dung.
For me it's been a true analog-to-digital conversion. I no longer sort-of-get any TV stations; I either get them or I don't. The stations I used to pick up pretty well, I now get perfectly. The stations I used to pick up poorly, I now don't get at all.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Unfortunately for the article submitter, there are no ATSC VIC-II chips in production...
Nobody seems to know why things go wrong anymore or how to fix them (not that anyone really knew before, other than "wiggle the antenna a bit and then stand right over there"). In my case, I get great reception on most of the channels I got before. The HDTV thinks its getting one channel that I kind of got before (shows up when I scan for channels) but it just shows a black screen for about 5 minutes before it admits that it can't find the signal (same with the subchannels). But the weirdest is one channel (and all of its subchannels) that plays audio properly, but the video plays too fast, before freezing every second or so to let the audio catch back up. No idea if its something the network is doing on its broadcast, a weird artifact of bad reception, or if my TV just isn't processing the video data right or what.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Comcast wanted to triple the rate to go from minimal analog to the equivalent digital offering. We said, "No thanks," and disconnected completely. Even my ten-year-old son was on board with the decision.
We watch a few shows on Hulu, get movies from the local library, and don't miss standard television at all. Much much better.
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/26/28-not-having-a-tv/
You're one of those people, STFU.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
What's this "TV" thing you speak of? Oh, right: the screen for the game consoles!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television
I work for a small multi system cable company. We have several headends servicing small towns in south eastern Arkansas. Our primary problem is co channel. There are fewer DTV channels available so they gave out the same frequency to multiple stations. Also the range for DTV is much lower than the old VHF analog spectrum. With the old analog system Co channel was mainly a ghosting on the screen. With DTV it results in a complete loss of signal. We have tried several different types of antennas with no change in the problem. What we need to fix these problems is for the FCC to remap the frequencies they hand out to the stations. However they are not planning to do that blaming instead the cable operators for not fixing the problem.
It wasn't a waste by any measure. The Government actually made money off of the spectrum it was able to reclaim and sell from the DTV transition. Plus, instead of sending wasteful Analog TV signals over the air, those channels are being reused to provide better cell coverage and other services.
I read the internet for the articles.
Nope. little tiny 32" round one. Point it east towards. Telstar 12 and get a lot, I can get a crapload of FTA stuff all over the sky from a tiny little 18" dish, but I find the low end small dishes suck compared to a nice 32" one with a decent quality feedhorn.
I've even got HD MPEG4 stuff in the open.
sonicView8000HD reciever works incredibly well. and it will scan the sky for me finding all the channels.. nothing but the initial dish alignment required... the dish positioner even will self align.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on May 31st that http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20100531/NEWS01/6010323/Forger-s-company-got-562K-stimulus-contract/ a local company, Tekreation Center LLC, recieved $562K in federal stimulus money to provide installation demonstration services to those who needed help getting the converter boxes to work. Demonstrations! Not actual installations. Tekreation reportedly performed 1,453 demonstrations for installing a digital-to-analog converter. $562,000/1453=$386.79 per demo. The could have bought a decent digital TV for that price. Another massive waste of your tax dollars.
I was just in a Circuit City store this week
Either you copy and pasted an old post, or you're lying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_City_(1949%E2%80%932009)
Anyone could implement an NTSC compatible, TV, Tuner card, PVR, camcorder... without paying anyone royalties.
Unlike copyrights, patents expire. For the first decade or so, NTSC color TV required a patent license from RCA (who incidentally sold its consumer electronics division to the company that now controls the MP3 patent). Unless you're fairly old, your reference point for comparison is probably sets produced in 1973 or later, over 20 years after NTSC was standardized. Likewise, ATSC is based on the same codecs as DVD (AC-3 audio and MPEG-2 video), so essential codec patents will expire within the next half decade.
In the analog days there were effectively three tiers of programming on cable - broadcast channels, cable only non-premium stuff, and premium channels like HBO. Since it was hard to encrypt a channel the middle tier channels were left in the clear. So as long as you had cable ready TVs you only really needed a cable box for the TVs you wanted to be able to watch the premium tier channels on, secondary TVs like kitchen, home office, workshop TVs could work just fine without one.
With digital that changed, so instead of just switching from analog->digital the cable companies are switching from analog->ENCRYPTED digital and telling the public that it had to be that way all along - it didn't. So except for the broadcast networks which are required to be in the clear soon you'll need a cable box for EVERY TV in your house, not just the ones you wanted the premium channels on.
And what did the FCC do for us on this?? Cablecard was a failure and when they were available at all the only Cablecard equipped TVs were the high end ones - WRONG!!! For the really big TVs in your house having a cable box is less of a problem than it is for the small TV in your kitchen/office/workshop. The FCC mandated that every HD TV have a digital tuner, and that seems to include a tuner for unencrypted digital cable channels, but the cable industry is making sure that there won't be many of those, so that tuner is all but useless unless you get your signal over the air.
The FCC tried to use Cablecard so we wouldn't have to rent as many cable boxes. The result? You'll need more cable boxes than you ever did before.
The worst thing about the conversion is that there is no redundancy in the signal. No multi-cast, spread-spectrum, nothing useful for checking or comparing signals.
And that kind of broadcast is only useful over hard-wired, land-lines with guaranteed hardware in the middle. Which means paying a multi-conglomerate for permission to watch "over the air" signals.
Thanks, stupid government. I hope you learn next time!
8-PP
armanox is watching on a translator station, which still transmits analog?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_relay_station#Digital_transition
It's a widely held, yet wrong, belief that all NTSC transmission had to stop. Some still remains, for like 1% of the population.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
But that leads to a very serious question.
And who is going to pay for all this?
The trouble is that the FCC wanted to auction off these frequencies to companies to raise money and to enable new services, which is all well and good.
The converter program was already controversial in terms of the amount of money it cost, and roundly criticized in rural circles because the new digital stations tend to broadcast using just enough power to reach their majority markets (the people who are largely already on cable anyway, because it's available there). Add to that the fact that digital signals just vanish below a threshold where analog is still very viewable, and you lose a lot of viewers.
But not enough to make it worthwhile to turn the transmitter power up.
If you offered them decent-speed Internet, many of them couldn't afford to take advantage of it anyway. So pipe in all the 3G you want, by the time you offer them a tethered connection at $60 a month, a lot of them would have to decide between news and food. Food wins.
Dialup would abound in areas like that, if the folks had the money to buy a computer and the $15 a month for an account, assuming anyone offered it that cheaply out in the sticks. I've offered up more than one computer, only to see it never turned on because dialup is $20-30 a month and limited to 28.8k due to overloaded phone lines, satellite is even more expensive, and Cable or DSL are a distant dream available miles away.
TV had the advantage of being free (for the consumer, at least), and faster than the delayed delivery of the newspaper.
Who has the incentive, the will, and the resources to serve this population? Who wants to use even part of the money the government made selling off the spectrum used to give the vast minority (rural elderly on fixed income) their TV back?
Most of them probably just pick up a newspaper on their weekly grocery run now and fall further out of touch on the daily news. And it's hard to justify spending a lot of money to get them back to the flashy high technology they depended on in the 1970s.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Yes low-power (LP) and clear-air (CA) stations, which includes translators can remain analog indefinitely. Last I heard about one-third of them flashcut directly from analog-to-digital transmission on midnight, while others are still gathering the necessary funds to buy the DTV equipment.
Here in Maryland there's no analog whatsoever.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall