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Television Media

FCC Wading Into Digital TV Quagmire 268

Posted by Roblimo from the long-promised-but-not-yet-delivered- dept.
Carnage4Life writes "The FCC is beginning to get impatient with the cable TV industry and television manufacturers for not getting digital TV out to consumers more quickly. In an interesting speech delivered at the CES on Friday the FCC chairman explains that the FCC is reluctant to dictate standards to the industry but will do so if no consensus on standards is reached by April."
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FCC Wading Into Digital TV Quagmire More

FCC Wading Into Digital TV Quagmire

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  • Re:Why do I want digital TV? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How many consumer A/V stanards do you know of that started out as ready for the average consumer? They're ALL upper class toys for the first couple of years.
  • Charter is the nations fourth largest cable company, and here is their spin on telling your government representatives why you want the cable company to dictate to you who your ISP will be. http://forcedaccess.chartercom.com/ "Charter's ability to offer leading edge technology to consumers will be thoroughly compromised if forced to reconfigure broadband networks so that competing businesses can use them to sell Internet access." Change "Charter" and "broadband" to "Your local phone company" and "telephone" and you see where this turd of an idea comes from. Tell your local ISP to make their voice heard, too. Paul Allen has a lot more money to spend on this than any of us have, but he only gets one vote, and he can't vote in all the cities that cut cable contracts. Let your city officials know how your choice of ISP is an issue you take to the voting booth.
  • I hate external decoders of any kind. Why can't they build this shit into a VCR. There's lots of stuff I want to watch when (1) I'm at work, (2) I'm asleep, or (3) won't have time to watch until the weekend. Why the fuck is gov't and industry getting between me and tv/movies? Am I just thinking like an asshole or something here?

  • Re:And again content protection.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's legal [hrrc.org] to record from TV. That's what VCRs were intended for.
  • As such it has no ability to lock out recording. Before VCRs, control of viewing was in the hands of the broadcasters. Once aired, it could be known for certain that people wouldn't be watching the same stuff later or save copies. Now Hollywood wants to make sure that the next standard has switchable copy protection built into the standard. They're going to try to get the broadcast equivalent of region lockouts, macrovision, SCMS, and DIVX (for PPV stuff) rammed into the new standard.They hate analog because they can't control copying (macrovision is a weak protection scheme and is easily snipped with a $10 box).
  • Supposedly, the 6MHZ wide NTSC channels are used highly innefficiently. Why couldn't they piggy back the digital signal onto NTSC such that the signal as a whole remains backwards compatible? New sets could receive the enhanced resolution data and old sets would ignore it. When color TV came about, did they decide to obsolete all B&W sets? Hell no! There would've been consumer riots. So they wedged the color data into a "colorburst" (high speed high-density data pulse with color info in the blanking interval). B&W sets ignored the pulse. Colot TV sets picked it up and used it to add color to the next scanline. DTV should have done something similar. Obsoleting NTSC is pure idiocy.
  • The FCC should just pick a standard, with no copy protection, easiest to implement, and then just make compliance a condition of broadcasters license renewals (yes, nowadays even cable-only broadcasters have to be FCC licensed, so they get included). Anyone who doesn't like it can get off the air and go lock themselves in a sealed chamber with their "precious" proprietary programming. Seems pretty simple to me.
  • > It sounds to me that the Commission's mandate is
    > exactly to 'protect the citizens' rights' when
    > the market tries to abuse them.

    That's what I'm saying, though. Since when is viewing digital TV a right? That's like saying everyone has a right to a Rolls-Royce. It's one thing if the FCC is going to allocate the bandwidth for digital TV, but it's quite another to say "We are mandating a new road system. You'd better have it built in 5 years. It's the law."

    The market hasn't abused anything, because the market hasn't really done anything at all... :) If there's enough demand for digital TV, it will happen. Trying to set an artificial timeline for it will just force them to try implementing things before they're ready, or the government will step in and screw it all up.

    In the meantime, things like DVD have given the early adopters enough of a new toy with a better picture that they've taken the steam out of an immediate "need" for higher-quality TV.
  • > First of all, current low-definition TV takes a
    > lot less bandwidth than HDTV, and most cablecos
    > and TV networks would rather have more channels
    > than a few really high quality ones.

    No kidding. We've actually got a couple channels here that are 2-in-1, to make room for the "digital" cable service ( = "look at the mpeg artifacts, honey!"). VH1 from 3am to 3pm, then it turns to Comedy Central... gee, thanks TCI.
  • Color TVs can recieve B/W signals and B/W TVs understand color signals.

    Not true for digital/analog...

    I don't think the FCC is requiring digital HDTVs, etc yet. I think the current solution is box+analog TV. (Which is what current digital cable solutions and all digital satellite solutions are.)

  • Re:or (Score:1)

    by MassacrE ( 763 )
    there was actual a full private-eye mystery novel that was published as a palindrome (although, just letters, not capitalization or spacing). I forget how many pages long it was, I know it was either over 100 or over 200. Not the most incredible reading from what I understand, though :)
  • I admit now that all I read was the first link, another summary.

    However, what I read said that he would ask his staff to come up with a proposed set of rules to govern this stuff. Nothing like actually writing up a real standard.

    If I'm wrong, then please reply with a little more detail there next time, Mr. Ben Stein.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • If the gov't thinks this process should be moving quicker, why don't they propose a standard, or build a cheaper TV set? I have no respect for those who whine about arbitrary deadlines, without considering the issues.

    And what's this about illegally copying cable programs? I thought people have been legally copying them for years. Otherwise, programmable, cable-ready VCRs would be in a legal grey area, right? This sounds about as stupid as the whole "DVD encryption" fiasco.

    Oh well, when I get my next computer (hopefully in less than a year) I'll be happy with my built-in DVD-ROM, and hopefully I'll be watching DVD movies on my 17" monitor in a sufficiently righteous resolution. Who needs Digitally Remastered Saved-By-The-Bell-esque crap when you have that?
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • Rochester, NY? That's where I am. I got digital cable and it's pretty nice(except early on it kept screwing up and you'd see the picture digitizing).

    What's sweet is ordering the pay per view movies and taping them. If only I had a DVD writer :)

    Well anyway, the prices couldn't go up much higher than as is. It's currently ~$100/month for cable TV and the cable modem. Damn you Time Warner.

  • yup (Score:1)

    by crayz ( 1056 )
    mine pieces together the picture, it's annoying as hell, sometime it will take up to 3 or 4 seconds

    I have some other small gripes about the Scientific Atlantic box and the software, but in general I'm pleased, especially with the picture and sound quality
  • My guesses:

    1. Digital broadcasters will all opt for multiple low-res channels as opposed to one high-res channel.

    2. Digital cable companies will compress channels into the high-lossy realm. We'll have more infomercials than ever; there won't be the content to fill all those channels for quite some time

    3. Digital to analog converters will be a huge business. Most people will keep their analog televisions during the next decade.

    4. Digital television will succeed greasest as an add-on card to personal computers using flat screen monitors. These computers will be hooked up to cable, not an antenna.


  • For now, DTV and HDTV (just a higher picture quality of DTV, term to be phased out) are more expensive. Forcing the demise of analog may be quick, but it'll happen in time.

    The prices will go down for the added DTV capabilities, much like how (B&W TV | Color TV | LD | CD | DVD) units used to cost thousands, now you practically get them with your corn flakes, and digital to analog converters will be available cheaply once it gets to mass production.

    Do you get ghosts? static? DTV pretty much eliminates them. A magazine I subscribed (Popular Science?) did a test and at every site they tried, DTV reception was fairly flawless while the analog counterpart has static and ghosts.

    Other posts indicate that the extra equipment doesn't cost more to operate.
  • OnDigital [ondigital.co.uk] has been broadcasting digital multichannel TV through normal rooftop arials for about a year and a half now.

    We live out in the sticks [custodian.com] and aren't likely to see cable anytime soon- and with local planning laws we can't have a satellite dish (can't have the tourists thinking us quaint old rural folk have technology now, can we?). Thus I was originally worried that OnDigital would be pants because I had no other choice for multichannel TV.

    The answer is far from it. OnDigital ROCKS. Super sharp picture, digital now/next programme guide, loads of GOOD channels including loads of British and American programming.

    It costs twelve quid (US$18) a month for 30 regular channels, and premium stuff such as new movies and football start at an extra seven quid (US$11) a month.

    Nice thing about the receiver set top box is that it is BIOS flash upgradable over the airwaves. You just tell it to download the latest upgrade and off it goes. There are new features added every couple of months. Picture-in-picture teletext was the last upgrade; email is coming soon.

    I just can't imagine life anymore without Cartoon Network [cartoonnetwork.co.uk].

    --

  • Clinton gets votes and endorsements...

    Uhm, perhaps you can clearify your point a bit...

    In your scenario, Clinton would be getting votes for what? Is Clinton planning to run for some important office in the near future? I know he won't be running for his current office again.

  • No, IIRC NTSC is the second FCC color standard, and do remember that there were a number of early television experiments since the 20's. A lot of people were working on it.

    The original color standard was basically going to transmit the R, G and B channels as sequential black and white signals, and the reciver would have a synchronized spinning wheel in front of the tube with R, G and B filters. But it was incompatable with the black and white transmission system and a real pain in the ass. NTSC was clearly a better choice when it was picked.

    Personally, I think that local NTSC broadcasts should be left alone, BUT send HDTV signals over subsidized low-cost cable in cities, or digital satellite for rural areas. (somewhat like universal phone service) With a bit of work I think it shouldn't be hard to pipe local channels to their appropriate geographic areas. This wouldn't apply for pay channels, just the stuff you'd normally expect to get on VHF/UHF broadcasts.

    Then slowly phase out NTSC broadcasts as the market switches to HDTV. Say 20-30 years.
  • "Many areas still have legalized monoplies (the exact opposite of what should be happening in a market controlled partially by the government)."

    You couldn't be more wrong. When the government controls a "market" (in quotes cuz it really stops being a market then, doesn't it?), legalized monopolies are what happens. In fact, that's the ONLY way a legalized monopoly can exist, just look at the words: LEGALized monopoly. When the local gov't grants an exclusive charter for a power company, cable company, phone company, taxi company, or whatever, that's a legalized monopoly. Only de-regulation can solve this problem.

    MoNsTeR
  • here I go advancing my personal politcal agenda again...

    Hey FCC, WHY IN THE FLYING FUCK IS THIS NECESSARY, HMMMM???!!!

    I was at Best Buy the other day scoping out a new stereo, and I decide to wander through the TV section to check out this whole HDTV thing. Well, they've got this display of two equally-sized (56", yikes!) Panasonic TVs, one digial, one analog. Aside from a difference in their color settings (totally unrelated to technology differences), I simply could not tell the difference. And what's more, I didn't see any HDTV sets in reasonable sizes. If I wanna go digital, why can't I do it for less than four figures? I don't even have room in my house for a 50-some inch TV (much less the cash to afford one).

    But... I do recognize that some people really do dig this digital TV thing, for whatever reason. I think they're crazy for it, but lots of people think *I'm* crazy for liking Trinitron screens. Go figure.

    The point is that the government has ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS forcing me to buy a $3000 TV I don't want just to have the same functionality I have now, whether it's now or in 6 years. And if they succeed in making the relevant industries switch over by then, that's exactly what will be happening since I won't be able to watch digital signals on my old analog sets.
    Why is analog TV soooooo horrible that we've got to rid ourselves of it so quickly? As another poster noted, I'd rather have cable internet service than digital TV. Hell, I rarely watch TV at all. If the industry wants to take its sweet time figuring out a standard, then let's let it! I don't see how the FCC barging in and setting the standard (and making it law, to boot) would be beneficial to ANYONE.

    As a free-market'er and a Libertarian, this pisses me off. It's time we start working to get the government out of our businesses and lives.

    www.lp.org
    www.self-gov.org
    www.mises.org

    MoNsTeR
  • If something better came along that does not break compatibility with our existing equipment, I don't think you would be hearing these (justified, IMNSHO) complaints.

    But at what point to you simply ignore the complaints and drive ahead?

    I mean, I'm sure there were complaints from the buggy-whip camp when autos became available, or from typewriter users when the first wordprocessors were available. Imagine society if we had not ignored them.

    (then again.. sounds like a tech-free vacation to me, but I definitely wouldn't want to live there..)

    Your Working Boy,
  • (Intermedia, now Charter)

    Lol.. "Helicon Communications" here in Vermont just changed names to Charter... Its a global conspiracy..
  • > The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.

    You forgot to mention that at 8 years old you'll understand less than half of the jokes. But most of them will still be fun.

    Reread the books when you're 20 or so, and you'll have double the fun!

    Nobody, repeat NOBODY "gets" more than 80 or 90% of the jokes in a Terry Pratchett book. You really need a whole army of people to find them all. I once read a TP book, just after reading a Dawkins book. Only then do you understand that TP had just been reading that same Dawkins book just before writing his book. This goes COMPLETELY past you if you haven't read the other book less than a few months before....

    Roger.
  • I may give up television if NTSC goes away without a cost-effective alternative.
  • not quite,

    B&W tv's (at least originally) don't understand the color signals at all, it's just that in Color NTSC encoding, the lower portion of the bandwidth (and most of it I must add) is used for intensity encoding (i.e. the B&W signal). B&W tv's don't decode the other two bands of the orthogonal color set (hue and saturation, I believe), and these higher frequency encoded signals just end up as high frequency noise which isn't noticeable in the final picture on the B&W set.
  • I must say I was initially skeptical about digital TV but when I was home over christmas I used it every day...

    One thing I found rather absurd is that there was no direct equivalent of the teletext information services in digital form. We had fancy online shopping and whatnot but none of the magazine style content that traditional teletext gives.

    The picture is sharper, and a widescreen TV is definately a good thing. But if you've spent any amount of time playing around with video codecs then you'll see the kind of artifacts that mpeg produces. - YOu have to know what to look for though.

    The US needs someone like the BBC to kick them into shape - the BBC have always take a lead in supporting standards - RDS is a good example. No radio station was going to get RDS until radios included RDS and the manufacturers weren't going to include RDS until stations started using it.
    The BBC set it up and now it's spreading....
  • I've worked in television broadcast engineering for 25 years and have kept abreast of digital TV development during all these years.

    As a matter of fact, the Advanced Television System Committee worked on a digital standard that would be backwards compatible with your existing TV for many of the past years.

    When a compatible standard that allowed market demand to drive the transition to digital TV was finalized, the way market demand drove the transition to color, THEN Microsoft and several other lesser computer industry manufacturers (having _declined_ to participate in the work until that point) cried foul; that Advanced TV was a closed system and they were left out.

    Congress heard M$ and friends, and sacrificed compatibility so that M$ could "embrace and extend" TV, and further realizing that you have no particular reason to throw away your TV, camcorder and VCR, then _mandated_ that NTSC would be turned off to make way for Bill's system.

    Bill specified your new TV system. Is it any surprise that you have to throw your old TV away now?
  • DragonHawk said -

    [bobbit] Given the limited initial demand for HDTV, what do you think the broadcasters are going to do? Waste all that bandwidth on a signal most are not going to use, or give us what we currently have and lots of extra money leasing their bandwidth? I know which one I would bet on.

    So, if you think you are going to be seeing a better TV picture any time soon, think again. Except to spend lots of money to upgrade your equipment, but with zero reward. [/bobbit]

    If you live in a major TV market you can see hi-def TV _right_now_. Last night's X-files was available as hi-def TV to those who had digital TVs in the big markets. More and more programs will be available in HD, just the way color TV slowly took over from black & white.

    True, the option of whether to broadcast HD signals or a lesser-grade picture is up to the broadcaster and some stations, especially smaller ones, will opt for the cheaper route of using their NTSC legacy programming to save money; conversion to HD is going to be expensive. At the bare minimum a station has to have a new encoder and transmitter. Most will require much more. (The going rate for the encoder alone is $250,000)

    You will have to throw away your analog TV. The station has to throw away their analog cameras, recorders, switchgear and distribution, transmitters and test equipment. The smaller ones will stick with NTSC-quality and lease out the three (not five) remaining NTSC-quality virtual channels to pay the bills.

    When the digital TV conversion is complete, you will see either the wide-screen HDTV picture or you will have four channels to choose from instead of one. Either way you DO get more. (Yes, you might have four channels that suck instead of one)

    It's inconceivable that broadcasters would simply stick with a single NTSC-quality signal and lease out the remaining bandwidth for wireless data. Who would buy it? It is still a one-way path from the transmitter to you.

    Do broadcasters hope the whole idea of HDTV will flop and go away? Not after investing millions of dollars in new equipment. Real world experience proves broadcasters want it to happen; there are far more stations converting to digital than industry forecasts expected and the FCC Orders required.


  • Said I:
    It's inconceivable that broadcasters would simply stick with a single NTSC-quality signal and lease out the remaining bandwidth for wireless data. Who would buy it? It is still a one-way path from the transmitter to you.

    Said DH:
    Um, gee, the wireless communications market is only hotter then the core of the sun right now. I can't imagine what anyone would want all that bandwidth for. /SARCASM

    Is the wireless market hot for ONE-WAY bandwidth? I can see the possibility for fast downloads for browsing if broadcasters wanted to get into the ISP business and use bandwidth above a single NTCS-quality channel to blast out HTML content.

    But, put it in a real situation; take an average-sized TV market, 400,000 people. Maybe they have 6 local TV stations. If any ONE of those stations devotes the other 3/4 of their bandwidth to wireless data, that's enough bandwidth to serve the whole community. The other five stations can't get into the same wireless ISP business and expect to pay the transmitter power bill with that income.

    The recurring theme that TV must convert to digital to "pull off the swindle" is ludicrous. The TV industry is making the largest investment in its history to convert. If HDTV should fail, they are screwed. This is not a 'trial balloon' for TV. It's sink or swim, and trying to use the bulk of the band for one-way datacasting won't make it float.

    My bookcase is full of TV industry trade pubs and direct mail ads. They are all for HDTV conversion equipment. Not a one of them advertises any kind of wireless datacast service or equipment.
  • Why can't the cable systems just bent pipe the 6 MHz HDTV signal through their distribution system like they currently do with the 6 MHz NTSC signal?

    Let the cable subscriber's set top box or HDTV receiver decode the signal.

    There is enough useless crap on my local cable system that there shouldn't be a problem with adding the HDTV signals from the local TV stations.

  • I suppose the market they are worried the most about is small video stores that would make digital recordings of PPV or HBO movies and then sell or rent the copies.

    Other than that, you would have to be paranoid to care. Last week's football game or a Simpsons episode has so little commercial value that it wouldn't be worth the effort.

    I suspect that their solution is to quash recordable digital media. Compatible DVD-WO doesn't exist yet, and DigitalVHS has been in limbo forever, and DV camcorders are limited to a short record time. I suspect these facts aren't coincidental.
    --
  • Trying to peg Clinton as the perpetrator of this is a little strange -- Congress (Republican and Democrat) got millions of dollars in lobbying money from broadcast interests to pass the bill requiring digital transmission.

    Now, I'm not saying Clinton didn't get his share of the pie, but my understanding is that the FCC is under a legal mandate to ensure the digital transition happens smoothly.
    --
  • The airwaves are owned by the public, so the theory is that the government is ensuring that they are put to wise use. Five different AM Stereo formats wasn't in anyone's best interest except the people trying to kill AM stereo.

    Computer standards on the other hand are controlled by Intel and Microsoft, there is no implied public interest.
    --
  • OK, the alternative scenario is that everyone buys a new TV in the next 5 years, and we spend the rest of our days watching "Urkel" in full photorealistic resolution. The broadcasters happily give the analog spectrum back to the government. Then Heidi Klum falls in love with me and I win the lotto. It's going to be a glorious future!
    --
  • The limits to their spectrum expanded significantly when Congress granted them both the digital and the analog spectrum for free.

    With current television hardware, HDTV will be a failure. Most people don't even have TVs good enough for DVD resolution, and many (such as myself) even get crappy NTSC pictures. The market for system which potentially has 2x DVD resolution has to be very limited.

    And the broadcasters know this -- they'll broadcast enough HDTV until they can declare it a failure. Then they'll start using their digital spectrum for multiple networks over the air (or for paging services, etc.).

    Meanwhile, wait for the whole digital transition to be declared a partial failure. That means the broadcasters can hold onto both the analog and the digitial spectrums, for free, until Congress can be convinced to ignore the money being waved in their face and turn off every little old lady's analog TV. It probably won't happen before 2015.

    The broadcasters aren't stupid here -- they know that "everyone" isn't going to move to HDTV for a long time, and plan to take maximum advantage of the situation. They're in the process of pulling of one of the greatest scams in US history.
    --
  • >These computers will be hooked up to cable, not an antenna.

    Hmmm, how do you figure? I'd think that if ~30 channels would be available over their air, quite a few people would drop their cable service. (Are the extra 50 channels worth it?)

    Also, broadcast digital will be a standard format, and therefore easier to build a tuner card for. Digital cable runs a different standard on each system, so you would still require an external box (which could mean you would only need an extra cable box, and firewire/whatever-becomes-the-standard input.)
    --

  • I love the Grinch. No childhood without the Grinch is complete, dammit. :)



  • I think I first read C. S. Lewis' Narnia novels around that age. They're very cool. There's a subtle Christian subtext in them, but when I was a kid it was way too subtle for me to notice.


    Robert A. Heinlein's "juvenile" novels: The Star Beast (which lured me into SF at around age 8), Time for the Stars, Between Planets, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Farmer in the Sky, Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, Tunnel in the Sky, and several others that don't come to mind immediately. I assume you've read Heinlein's adult SF, but if you haven't, you should know that (IIRC) anything he wrote for adults after the early 1960's tends to have sex in it. His juveniles, though, were written in the 1950's with the intent of reaching a wide audience of young people and getting them interested in space exploration, and they stay within the bounds of what was considered "suitable for children" at that time.


    Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels are very good also: In order, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore. There's a fourth one, Tehanu, which was intended for adults and which may or may not be suitable for a child. It's pretty grim in spots. It's also slow-moving enough that a child may just be bored by it.


    Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels. Del Rey published a set of these back in the 1980's which had some of the best cover art I've ever seen, but um, the art itself was a bit racy in spots. The books themselves, however, are entirely "suitable for children" by the standards that were current around 1919.


    Hmmm . . . of the above, Lewis and LeGuin and to some extent Burroughs fall more in the "fantasy" category than "SF", but at that age I didn't make much of a distinction. At any rate, all of the above are books that I still read from time to time in my thirties.

    All the "suitable for children" crap above is merely because I don't know where you stand on such things, and for some people that's a concern. My parents let me read anything I wanted to, and it didn't seem to do me any harm.

  • Clarification:

    Clintion, in 1992 and 1996, did mucho fundraising among technical businesses. If he told them something, that would give them a way to sell a whole bunch of new TVs, it may have opened up their wallets some more.

    Oh yeah, and Clinton DOES make the appointments to the FCC, so I peg him. Not that I'm excusing certain members of Congress; part of the CDA was the V-Chip, after all.
  • Not just likely. They're commited to doing it.
    Multicast NTSC durring the daytime (for children's shows) and HDTV at night.
  • Wow can you cook on that sucker like I can on my old coax box?
  • I can't be at home to watch the big fight, but would like to watch it later. PPV is going to be where the strongest copy protection schemes will be applied. But you're right, "they" want *all* copying to be decreed illegal. After all, if *some* copying was explicitly permitted by law and gov't, and there's copy-protection in place, then the manufacture of defeating devices must also be permitted to allow people to exercise their legal rights. Ban all copying and then it becomes easy to ban all copy-protection-defeating devices.

    BTW, has anyone noticed that the HRRC [hrrc.org] (Home Recording Rights Association) seems to be dead? No new content on their page for some time now.

  • He was doing great until we hit this:

    Third, where the market does not work to promote consumer welfare, the Commission must. That's my job. It's in the law. It's our responsibility, and the public rightfully relies on the FCC when the market does not protect the public's interests.

    God, that's scary... the whole idea that the privilege (not right!) to watch TV is something that the government thinks it is their job to dictate. I guess it's only a free market until the government feels like doing something else.

    I would think the only place the government would have any say at all over is what bands this digital TV should broadcast over.

    I dunno... maybe it's just a knee-jerk reaction, but whatever happened to "protect the nations boundaries" and "protect the citizens' rights". It seems like there's much better things we could be spending our time on... it seems like every time the government makes a standard, it turns into a joke (can we say OSI? :).

  • I don't know about other areas, but in upstate NY, Time Warner is going to get the sh*t kicked out of them by the digital satellite companies unless they charge LESS for DTV.

    Why?

    Because the satellite systems are already digital, and are much cheaper than even analog cable service. Dish Network is $30/month for 100 channels plus 40 music channels and amazing quality. Time Warner in upstate NY is $40/month for 63 ugly-looking channels.

    Admittedly, the satellite vendors have one disadvantage - while the new small-dish systems have dropped the price quite a bit, you're looking at a minimum of $150 for a basic 1-TV setup, and $300 for a 2-TV setup, with $100 for each additional TV.

    BTW, when I refer to "satellite", I'm speaking of the new guys like Dish and DirecTV, not the "old-skool" big-dish systems.

    Time Warner is *afraid* of satellite, their only way to battle it is an all-out FUD war, which they've begun in Ithaca already.

    Not that I believe any of it. In my new apartment next year, we're going to Dish. (My uncle has it and loves it.)

    URLS: http://www.directv.com/ and http://www.dishtv.com/ - I personally get a better impression of Dish than DirecTV
  • This plan has been in place for a couple years. IIRC it was a 5 or 6 year plan. But the cable companies and TV companies have been dragging their feet. If they had started broadcasting DTV sooner more people would be using it now. Same goes for HDTV's if companies were broadcasting for it and TV manufactures were actually trying to sell the sets to the middle class it would be much more popular and affordable.

    Same old problem Linux has/had: "Don't use it because people aren't developing apps for it. Let's not develope apps for it because people aren't using it." Instead it is "Don't broadcast HDTV because people don't have the sets. Don't make the sets affordable because nobody broadcasts in HDTV." Same for DTV.

    Somebody has to do something. The studios need to start making DTV and HDTV shows or cable companies need to start supporting it and TV manufactures lowing their prices or nothing will get done. And the FCC is getting fed up with none of them doing anything.

    --

  • After going through hoops with TCI/ATT in an attempt to get Digital Cable, I don't want HDTV/DTV. Why?

    I'll simplify this. Because your going to get screwed by the cable companies. Take my Digital Cable fun as an example.

    I have xDSL at home, ummm addictive bandwidth. Then I decided I wanted TCI/ATT Digital Cable. Guess what. The analog modem in the Digital Cable box won't work in my house. No I have to get a seperate analog phone line if I want all the Digital goodness that TCI will give me. Even better...lets spam your phone with calls about @Home once we know your a DSL user.

    Now with all this "interactive" menuing and channel guides that you get with DSS and Digital Cable, your going to need analog phone lines aren't you?

    I don't want the hastle of a new medium. I don't want to buy boxes for my current TV, I don't want to have my boxes jacked into analog phone lines that I'm going to be shelling $14 a month for, and I really don't want to have to deal with a freaking antenna for HDTV.

    I would like Star Wars and the Indiana Jones movies on DVD though
  • except that I have heard of no plans for a 27 mb/s cable modems. I have a cable modem now, and it's fast enough(a little over 100K/sec upstream, 700K/sec downstream at peak)

    But hey, the faster the better(not that most sites can dish out close to even 700K/sec)

  • I can't comment directly on DTV, but I can compare DSS to broadcast. There is a tremendous difference. For worst case (channel 5 in Atlanta), it's the difference between clear to the limits of the TV itself vs. practically unviewable (the all important X-files is on 5!). On other channels where reception is good anyway, there is still a distinct improvement in sharpness and color. This is noticable on a 25 inch screen at 10 feet (probably also at 20 but it's a small room so I don't know).

    Before DSS, we had analog cable. It was SLIGHTLY better than broadcast on the worst stations, and not as good as broadcast on the best (which is sad really). It also went out a lot (according to our neighbors, it still does).

    Digital cable uses mpeg as well, but based on reports here, I'm guessing they use a smaller bitrate. On DSS, there ARE occasional mpeg artifacts, in particular with bright flashes with lots of detail on the screen, but it's a lot less than the constant problems with either analog cable or broadcast.

    Short summary, digital can be great, but it's dependant on decisions made by the provider.

  • I work for Scientific Atlanta and we're quite proud of those boxes. Nine months ago, we had to virtually give the first boxes away. Now we can't ship them fast enough. We've already shipped over a million. And you should know that there are going to be a lot of great things that you can do with those boxes in the future. Wish I could tell you more.

  • In the rest of the world, GSM rules because their local legislature made it so - as the sole standard for their country. I can call anywhere in Australia and many other contries without changing my handset or the SIM card in it - I just turn it on and it works. I can drive from Melbourne to Cairns (about 4000 km by road) and have full service along practically the entire route with my 100 gm GSM handset. I can change carriers but retain my handset if I wanted to. I can take my SIM card (about 2 grams in weight) with me and use a friend's phone in Singapore or Scotland if that tickled my fancy.

    In the US, you can barely use some mobile phones within your own city, let alone another state. CDMA, TDMA, AMPS, PCS, and a little GSM thrown in; you name an half assed protocol, and the US has it. It's bad for consumers.

    Another example, already seen in this discussion is AM stereo. In Australia, FM Stereo was made mandatory with one single high quality format. It has been so successful, that today no one listens to AM for music. The government made a lot of money from AM music stations willing to move to FM to retain their listeners.

    Then the govt experimented and was burnt with self regulation, and the result was AM stereo. Complicated by two competing standards, consumers didn't buy the sets and car manufacturers settled on CQAM, but it was too late. I am not aware of any stations still transmitting in AM stereo after less than 15 years after its introduction.

    As a consumer, don't be afraid of a single standard. Be afraid of a single carrier, a single cable company, a single software company.

  • Whatever one may feel about the role of government and the FCC, it is nevertheless true that this is one area in which competition has failed in the US. Technically speaking, the US TV system has been *way* behind Europe's PAL and MAC for decades, and now that Europe has gone digital, the US has just dropped another step behind.

    Why market forces have failed utterly in this regard I have no idea, but they have, and it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that the US government is tired of 3rd world country status and is telling the FCC to do something about it. Heck, *somebody* needs to break the logjam. It's not as if the market hasn't had long enough to do it itself.

    Why has the market failed? Is it sewn up in cartels perhaps, and not actually free? Are Warner and Co to blame, seeing profits continue to roll in over the old system and hence not wanting to invest in new infrastructure? Whatever the reason, something pathological has happened there. Hopefully it'll get sorted out now.
  • Being screwed by your cable company isn't going to change until something new like digital TV is available and deliverable by competitors. That's a result of the "free market" in cable being free only in name, not in reality, because market forces don't work properly when only a single provider at a time can deliver cable and services to your door.

    You say you don't want multiple feeds in, but keeping everything separate works in your favour: when all communication goes through a single point, whoever operates the medium has you by the balls. That's why your cable operator can afford to give you crap service in the first place. Put up a dish and an antenna, and suddenly the cable operator has to wake up to a massive loss in profits, or else.
  • You're completely mistaken. The Internet runs on a single basic networking standard, namely IP, which is universal regardless of the delivery mechanism (Ethernet, ISDN, PSTN, ATM, frame relay, xDSL, etc). Without IP as a universal compatibility layer to which everyone subscribes, we'd be nowhere. (All the non-standards you mention are layered on top of IP.)

    There is nothing to take the place of IP in the TV world, so unless some standard is agreed the US is going rapidly nowhere in this area. The FCC understands standards, so as long as they don't go further and try to regulate content, their intervention would do the whole US TV scene a massive service.

    Alternatively of course, the US could continue to be a 3rd world country when it comes to TV. Your choice. Europe has for decades been laughing at the US backwater, quite rightly (PAL and MAC are massively better than NTSC), and now that Europe's gone digital, the laughter is deafening. Is that how you want things to stay?
  • Here where I live, cable modems are a myth. Other people have them. Time Warner here is sitting on its ass doing nothing about "digital cable" (saw a commercial for it... once.) and two way cable modems are a joke. Meanwhile, Bellsouth is cleaning house with a well built ADSL system, and good tech support. Mine kicks major butt when I'm in linux.
    I read on ABCnews that the audience went dead silent when he told them they had to put up some standards or get regulated and set a date. I figure it is about time someone tells those greedy broadcasters to quit thinking with their wallets and get moving. If we wait for them to bring about this super clear TV revolution you'll be old and grey. And Broke.
    Ironically, I've seen HDTV here in Jackson. The local PBS station has a digital system. Just no one to broadcast to. You can sit in their lobby and watch super clear images for hours...

  • Any good science fiction suggestions for an 8 year old boy?

    The Stainless Steel Rat series. Big fan of that at age 8. I'd also recommend Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and possibly the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I read 1984 when I was 9, but I don't necessarily recommend Orwell at that age ;)

    Cheers,
    Your Working Boy,
  • Nah, I like my WWII/Guns/Mystery channels, PBS, and my DVD collection. Still, my next set will come sans tuner and fully VGA/HDTV compatible. It's looking like Sony's VW10HT.

    Your Working Boy,
  • You forgot to mention that at 8 years old you'll understand less than half of the jokes. But most of them will still be fun.

    Perhaps, but what I've found over the years is that my favorite things (HHG, Python, Discworld, etc) got better over time as I learned more and could see more each time I reread or reviewed the stuff. I could never figure out who the hell Reginald Maudlin was and why Pythons would rip on him so, until I learned more.. And gods, imagine being a history major and being able to appreciate Holy Grail or Life of Brian on a whole different level after studying the Arthur legends or Roman Judea.. Hell, I got an A on a paper for my Roman Empire class writing about Life of Brian...

    MST3k also does this for me a bit, but I got into it late and thus know almost every riff ref ;) ;)

    Your Working Boy,
  • YOU WILL BE FORCED TO BUY NEW TELEVISIONS!!!

    In the interest of accuracy, you'll actually be forced to buy a new tuner to watch broadcast TV.

  • If, when DTV finally arrives, it should come in a form that makes it difficult to record off-air broadcasts or limits the number of playbacks...then I won't be having one in my house, that's all. It's a matter of principle. Who needs TV anyway.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • Part of the rationale for switching from NTSC to ATSC (HDTV) is to recover some of the huge amounts of spectrum that are currently allocated to NTSC. NTSC makes very inefficient use of the VHF/UHF spectrum.

    The original plan was to move all television stations to a smaller UHF band, freeing up the VHF channels and some of the UHF channels. It now looks like at least some of the VHF channels will remain allocated to television.

    The FCC wants to auction off some of the recovered channels and reallocate some of the channels to other services, such as land mobile.

    The television broadcasters would have lost even more spectrum without HDTV. A digital SDTV (standard definition) system would have greatly reduced their spectrum requirements.

    The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) was originally interested in HDTV as a means of protecting their spectrum allocations from other services (Motorola and land mobile). They needed to give the FCC a reason why it shouldn't reallocate large portions of the sparsely occupied UHF band to other services.

  • For anyone interested in the history of HDTV, I recommend the book "Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television" by Joel Brinkley (ISBN 0-15-100087-5). It is an interesting account of how money and politics, not technical merit, were responsible for the creation of HDTV.
  • I suspect that the television networks will have something to say about it. They may require their affiliates to carry the prime time network feed in high definition (1080i or 720p). NBC is not going to like competing against another network's high definition signal with a standard definition signal.
  • AM Stereo got shot down because the people who own the FM stations also own the larger AM stations. Allowing every religious and foreign language station to broadcast in 'hi-fi' would have killed the market value of the FM stations, so the station owners kept AM stereo in the bottle.

    For a few years in the 1980s, American car companies shipped AM Stereo capable recievers. Most people didn't notice, however, because nobody tried to broadcast hifi pop music on AM.
    --
  • That's exactly the point...

    B&W televisions can successfully decode the color signals, and produce perfectly good sight and sound.. it's just that the color is missing.

    Existing televisions have no use for the new digital signals... upgrades will be *required*, costing money...

    Of course, the FCC, unlike Congress, has no voters to answer to, so the FCC cares not a whit what people think. How's this for a scenario:

    Clinton gets votes and endorsements, for promising to appoint people who will ban NTSC broadcasts. Clinton appoints people, who promise to do so. Digital broadcasts suddenly get mandated. Everyone runs out and buys new TVs, making big bucks for the endorsees in step A.

    This is what people get for letting the government abuse (and violate) the interstate commerce clause. I say interstate commerce doesn't apply unless a broadcast station is really strong, strong enough to cross state lines. Let alone CABLE TV, where it's not broadcast at all!

    OK, enough ranting...
  • Blame the radio industry, not the FCC.

    It's not the government's place to write and mandate an AM standard, no more than it is the government's place to write and mandate a PC99 standard.

    I mean, what if they required all computers to sell Windows 98 as an option?
  • Having never seen a DTV or HDTV or anything other than my 13 inch sony basically, can anyone comment on how much better DTV and its cohorts are than standard TV? I mean, the picture on my tv seems fine to me. Is there a compelling reason to switch to the new thing? I mean, for all the TV I watch I'd be content with a 3 inch watchman.

    Just give me my Star Trek reruns, VH1's Rock Show and Behind the Music, and I'm pretty much set...

    Also, is this difference something you can see from 10 - 20 feet away, or do you have to be sitting right in front of it to bask in its digital superiority?

    ______________________________________
    um, sigs should be heard and not seen?

  • It's inconceivable that broadcasters would simply stick with a single NTSC-quality signal and lease out the remaining bandwidth for wireless data. Who would buy it? It is still a one-way path from the transmitter to you.

    Um, gee, the wireless communications market is only hotter then the core of the sun right now. I can't imagine what anyone would want all that bandwidth for. /SARCASM

    There is precisely one force driving any company: Money. Broadcast TV currently gets its money from advertising dollars. Will a high-definition signal pull in more ad viewers? No, people go for the programming. They want their ER and Ally McBeal. They don't care if it is broadcast in mono, stereo, or surround sound. They also don't care about the number of vertical scan lines. If they don't care, the advertisers don't care, and that means there is no good reason to offer HDTV, especially when you compare it to the previously noted white-hot wireless communications market.

    Last night's X-files was available as hi-def TV to those who had digital TVs in the big markets.

    I fail to see what that proves. All it says is they are willing to float a trial balloon to see what happens.

    When the digital TV conversion is complete, you will see either the wide-screen HDTV picture or you will have four channels to choose from instead of one.

    As has been observed by just about everybody, we don't need more channels, we need better content. (We being the American Public(TM), not the broadcasting industry.)

    There are far more stations converting to digital than industry forecasts expected and the FCC Orders required.

    The stations will have to convert to digital to pull off the swindle anyway, so that proves nothing.

    I'd like to hope that we all end up living in a shiny happy world of HDTV, but the cynic in me thinks the All-Mighty Buck will take precedence.
  • Guess I forgot the SARCASM tag again....
  • Hey, I'm glad someone caught the satire. I know my argument isn't techically sound, and it wasn't meant to be, it was just a response to that other guys "In my day we had crappy old TV and it was great" post.

    One of the problems with Slashdot as it stands is this moderation system coupled with people's viewing preferences leads to problems like this. A response to a post gets moderated to say a 5 (not that this post particularly deserved it, but hey, I'll take the extra karma), then people see it before the post it is refering too.

    Thats why flat mode -1 is the only way to go baby!
  • As if it was that much more expensive to make a reprogrammable decoding unit.

    We get along pretty well on the internet with several video, graphic, and audio "standards", because we need only download a new plugin. It could work the same way with HDTV.

    Anyway, I think the big problem right now is the price of the display itself. An HDTV is a television-sized display with computer-monitor resolution. Given the price of even a tiny 21" monitor, is it any surprise that HDTV is still too damned expensive?
  • If the FCC had gotten it's act together in the mid-late 80s we would be done with the conversion by now, but they didn't so we get to go through it now (now that there are three or four TVs per home...hmm...).

    That's because they have avoided doing any regulating and have waited for the market to sorts things out, which it couldn't.
  • Of course, it's an open question whether HDTV is actually a good idea. Consumers don't like superior tech when it's too expensive.

    hmmm, new HDTV set, or, a new car, hmmmm...
  • Look carefully and you will see that the protection of content is the stumbling block. Again and again more and more often we are seeing this. Will it change? Or will we change? Something is going to change.
    It seems that in some sence the means and modes of production are comming into conflict. Could we be looking at a world changing change (revolution) in our time?
  • My town just started offering digital cable recently, and I've noticed a dramatic decrease in the quality of my normal old cable. Specifically, it's that kind of "see through" effect, where objects going horizontally across the screen can be seen through similarly colored objects (read: people) in front of them.

    I'm under the impression that this is due to the compressions algorithms used -- the cable company is using some lossy compression to try and use less bandwidth (although Comcast blantantly denies any ghosting, shadows, or other image problems either exisiting or being their fault). It's not like I never noticed these before; it's just that the quality has gotten much, MUCH worse since digital cable began being offered. They're pobably trying to compress the image more, but I doubt that the occurance is just a coincidence.

    My problem is this: While many companies and industries are using digital this and digital that ernestly, others are using it for profit. Do I really need a HDTV? I'm perfectly satisfied with my 640x480 broadcasts - there's no way I'll pay hundreds (and, not too long ago, thousands) of dollars more for a higher quality broadcast. Does anyone really expect to be able to buy a cheap TV like the ones today and a cheap digital-to-analog converter 5 years from now?

    This is all just an exuse for the entire industry to go out and charge me more. Different companies are backing different standards depending on what's in their own interests, not what's best for the consumer. Frankly, I think that we're better off without some of these "standards" that are being tossed around.
  • I read the article and thought it was great, but I think it was overlooking a key player-- Public TV. Since public TV doesn't have the same motivations for wussing out on HDTV, they ARE likely to take full advantage of their HDTV spectrum. When consumers see a fantastically better picture on PBS than on MSNBC, they'll want to know why. Look for the big networks to try and smear public TV Real Soon Now.
  • yes it is. I don't know what the USB port is for, but Time Warner said that once the entire infastructure is digital the box will be my cable modem too.
  • Yep Videoway is going out... They've already started to rent -- you guessed it -- Digital TV set-top boxes.
    I've seen the results... Hoo boy! Artifact city! I can't possibly imagine over-the-aerial HDTV working with all the ghosting, click-and-pop every time someone turns on a light... and the interference caused by microwaves and blenders in your home.
    Rabbit ears suck! That's why they invented cable for crissakes. Now they want to go back?!?
    ---
  • Sure, so give the content and distribution companies five more years.
    Come back in five more years, and they're still sat on their arses mumbling to themselves...

    Both types of company haven't been customer focused in the true sense for years, and finally blowing up NTSC (about 25 years too late IMHO) will at least make them stop snoring and take a look around.

    Because a significant fraction of the investment in UK broadcasting comes from the public purse, we got working digital TV systems last year. However, I would swap all the steps forward we have compared with the US for a telecoms provider that wasn't dragging its feet on ADSL and call charges.

    It's nice to see that in all these cases the Government (in the form of the
    FCC and OFTEL) get to be good guys for a change.

    Nick.
  • You're confusing HDTV and DTV.

    HDTV what you're talking about. HDTV televisions are very expensive, and the high bandwith requirement is a major problem.

    DTV is another thing completely. DTV will work with any television you throw at it, using a receiver provided by your cable company. It gives you superior image quality when compared to analog TV, makes channel pirating almost impossible, lets you have a lot of value added services (like digital music channels, pay per view, nice on screen TV guides...)

    DTV isn't more expensive than analog is. Here, in Quebec City, somebody who had base analog service (about 35 CDN) will be able to go with DTV for 2$ extra. That includes a DTV receiver box and a choice of channels. With analog, you can only have preselected channels. With DTV, you get 16 base channels and you can choose 15 channels (with the base plan, it costs extra for extra channels) out of about 40. DTV is good for everybody, the consumer and the broadcasters, as it lets the customer choose the channels they want to get. No more Food network if you don't want it.

    HDTV is another beast entirely.
  • "the FCC doesn't want to dictate industry standards"

    Can't they learn from their own poor decisions??

    I remember them saying the exact same thing with AM Stereo, with the result being five different standards and fragmented technology. No single standard was ever adopted, receivers were expensive if you could find them, and nobody gave a care. In the end their still is no AM Stereo worth mentioning.

    So maybe that's why I am so pissed at hearing this statement from the FCC??

  • I'm seeing a lot of confusion in this thread between digital cable, DTV, HDTV, new sets, old sets etc. I have digital TV here in the UK (we've had it for about a year now) and so although YMMV I'd like to tell you all how it works here.

    First off, the DTV we get is NOT high definition. It is better quality, but that's due to a less lossy broadcast method. Basically when you subscribe to one of the digital services they give you a set top box which takes the digital signal and coverts it to PAL (or in the US case NTSC, or french SECAM etc). This then plugs into the back of your normal TV set. In my case I use a seperate RGB feed via SCART because RF sucks, but you can use RF is you really want.

    The picture quality is a lot better than analog broadcast, it's like watching DVD vs VHS. The signal going into the back of your TV is the same format (PAL) but the quality is better because of the quality of the source. There are also more channels, because as someone pointed out, over here rather than getting the same number of channels but in increased resoloution, we get more normal-res channels.

    A quick rundown of services available:

    * Digital Terrestrial : This is run by a company called ON Digital, they transmit a digital signal over standard terrestrial airwaves. You use your existing antenna and just plugin their box. You get about 10-15 premium channels.

    * Digital Satellite : The main european satellite broadcaster Sky run a digital service which is quickly taking over from their old analog service. This offers up to about 300 channels including audio only, foreign language etc. The downside is you need to install a small dish to pick up the signal. This is however free if you subscribe.

    * Digital Cable : I'm not sure if this is totally up and running yet, certainly the slowest to arrive. Cable has never been as big in the UK as satellite and the infrastructure is rather crap. Nonetheless digital cable offers similar service levels to satellite, no need for a dish (ugly!) and also broadband internet access which is still not really available over here.

    So to round up - from our experience if you need new equipment (such as set top boxes) the companies give them away. They started off charging but as soon as one company gave them away they all did The only investment you might want to make is for a widescreen TV, a lot more broadcasts are in 16:9 format now because they have spare channels, so you can have a 4:3 and 16:9 of the same film for instance. Also with DVD coming along widescreen is a Good Thing (tm) in general. And the picture quality is better, but it's not up to the levels of HDTV (which will require a new TV).

    If you have any questions feel free to post...


  • ... I've read through all posts in this thread now, and I've seen _loads_ of "my TV picture is just fine, why do we need anything better than NTSC?".

    Well, go to Europe and watch some PAL analog TV then - a lot better than NTSC. Then watch the same PAL analog TV with a 100Hz TV - wow! Now watch DVD piped through Svideo or RGB to that 100Hz widescreen TV - we're really getting interested now!

    Now imagine DTV and HDTV, more resolution (HDTV) than DVD, TV sets that don't even convert to analog before displaying (Plasma TV, anyone?).

    Why you need anything better than that _incredibly_ crappy NTSC shit?

    Because of the same f*cking reasons you don't use 8086 computers, black&white TVs, crap AM radio (oh wait, maybe you still do .. ), analog cellphone systems (damn, you do)!

    I'm happy I don't live in that 3rd world country called USA - technology from the 60's all the way through.

    Flamebait? Yes, but only if you're moderating with your personal US ego in front of your eyes.

  • Am I the ONLY one who read this positively?

    Say what you will about the FCC, and some of their silly decisions in the past. On the whole, this guy seems to 'get it.' Consider this summary of his speech;

    1) The industry has not been working for the consumer.
    2) The industry has been working for their own ends.
    3) By working towards their own ends, the industry hasn't developed any followed standards.
    4) By working towards their own ends, the industry has harmed the consumer.
    5) If the industry doesn't get off their asses ASAP, the FCC, backed by the US gov't, will kick said asses around, on behalf of the consumer.

    Strikes me as a decent kind of guy.

  • "Illegal" copying (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 09, 2000 @05:36PM (#1388364)
    Wow, so I guess all copying is illegal now. How many times must something be broken until they just give up? I'm tired of them trying to force this 'pay per play' shit down my throat. If that's the motivation behind digital tv, then I don't want any part in it.

  • In the UK... (Score:3)

    by martin ( 1336 ) <<maxsec> <at> <gmail.com>> on Sunday January 09, 2000 @10:53PM (#1388365) Journal
    We've had DTV for over a year now. The set top boxes are 'free' (if you take a subscription to the pay channels) and the integrated sets are now down to £500 (about $750) for a 28" set.

    THe EU/UK govmt decided to stop messing around waiting for the world to agree on a standard and went with the UK system - a little like they've done with GSM phones already mentioned.

    Switch-off for the analogue transmitters has been set to around 2010 (based on 90% of the population having got DTV recievers and 99% of the population being capable of recieving it then a hard will be set 2 years in the furture)

    For somethings the govnmt HAS to set the goals, thats what they are there for - a central body to HELP co-ordinate things and if neseccary force change.

  • digital cable (Score:3)

    by Haven ( 34895 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @04:19PM (#1388366) Homepage Journal
    I have been a beta tester for digital cable in my area (eastern TN) for a little over 6 months now. The cable box I use is made by Scientific Atlanta. You can see it here [dhs.org]. Anyway... the point of this post is that I'm not waiting for the digital infastructure to be in place so I can get more channels or better picture, I want the 27mb/s that Time Warner is promising once the entire area is digital.

  • Re:digital cable (Score:3)

    by Toth ( 36602 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @06:20PM (#1388367)
    One of the objections from the cable companies is the "Must Carry" rules. All local TV stations must be carried on the cable system. If they take up 27Mhz on the cable then it won't take long to use up all the bandwith with stations that people can get without cable.

    A typical recently rebuilt cable system is probably goes to about 650Mhz although there are still a lot of 300Mhz systems in North America.

    A 300Mhz system can carry about 36 6Mhz channels above 50Mhz. (Below 50 is used for upstream transmission and there is a hole for the FM band)

    I haven't looked into this so I may be guessing wrong but it seems to me that if we can squeeze four compressed channels into one 6Mhz slot, we should be able to deliver pretty good digital TV using less than 27 Mhz.

    The broadcasters will support anything which will cause hardship for the Cable Companies. If we expect the Broadcasters and the Cable Companies to solve the "problem" we will be waiting a long time.

  • In my town they're doing it right (Score:3)

    by RickyRay ( 73033 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @05:38PM (#1388368)
    I'm near Salt Lake City, and we've already got it. Cable went digital here a while back, and all of the local broadcasters (but one, I believe) teamed up to build a common HDTV broadcast center they all send their signal from, drastically reducing their costs and speeding adoption. Since they're broadcasting from a common location, it will also be a lot easier to receive, since you point the antenna at one peak to receive all the stations. I already have my HDTV (they're sweet, as long as the feed is S-video, progressive, or 1080i!), and will soon have my receiver (as soon as Toshiba sells the one to match my TV). Normally I avoid local channels, but it's hard to pass them up when they all go digital simultaneously.

  • What are they complaining about? (Score:3)

    by dsplat ( 73054 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @05:33PM (#1388369)
    Time Warner has been advertising digital cable here in Rochester for months. And I gather from the recent ads that they are installing now. I can just picture the standard being something different and costing some of the cable providers bigs bucks; a cost that will undoubtedly get passed along. As for me, I want a guarantee that when I go to digital cable that under no circumstances will I ever get the Golf Channel. If that happens, I won't get a single word out of my dad when he comes to visit.

  • Re:Why do I want digital TV? (Score:3)

    by MattXVI ( 82494 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @07:49PM (#1388370) Homepage
    I get your point but it isn't a good one. The FCC never mandated a switch from bw to color. Broadcasters were simply meeting a consumer demand. But there is little apparent demnd for digital tv. Also, unlike color/bw, the new digital tv sets are not automatically compatible with the old standard. You have to buy an expensive additional device for that.

  • Re:digital cable [NOT DIGITAL TV] (Score:3)

    by ecampbel ( 89842 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @06:14PM (#1388371)
    Digital cable has nothing to do with the Digital TV that the FCC is considering regulations for. Digital Cable simply converts regular analog TV signals to digital and then transmits this signal to cable boxes at people's homes. The cable box then converts the compressed digital signal to analog and sends it to the television. This makes the picture marginally clearer and allows cable companies to transmit more channels in the same bandwidth, but does not provide the major improvement in picture quality that High Definition digital TV provides.

    The FCC is impatient because they granted broadcasters an extremely lucrative block of frequencies in return for broadcasters using the frequencies to broadcast digital high definition television. Believe me, nothing compares to a high definition signal. Simply amazing!

  • Right on! (Score:4)

    by Venomous Louse ( 12488 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @06:20PM (#1388372)

    Hi, I'm Venomous Louse. I haven't owned a TV for five years now, and while it sometimes sucks a bit not to be able to rent movies, I've yet to lose any sleep about that. The fact is, TV sucks. Try not watching TV for a year, and then turn one on and watch a few commercials. It's like opening a door into an insane asylum, for God's sake! I am telling you, it is not normal to sit in a chair watching perfect strangers scream at you about how you should buy things that you don't care about. It may or may not be identical to North Korean mind-control techniques, but it's close enough to chill my blood and no mistake. In the rare intervals when they're not screaming at you to buy crap, they're bombarding you with dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama. All of this seems normal and reasonable to the habitual TV user, but after a year or so of drying out, you will suddenly begin to see it as a strange form of madness.

    Watching the news used to be given as a valid reason to have a TV, but there were always newspapers, and now we have the web. Both of those (especially newspapers) provide more depth than television anyway.

  • Why do I want digital TV? (Score:4)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @05:26PM (#1388373)
    The FCC's mandate to oust NTSC from the airwaves so soon is just a bonehead idea in my opinion. Digital TV is an upper class toy than something beneficial to everyone. Look for example at the prices of the DTVs, they are thousands of dollars, where the analog 25" one I have was only a few hundred and I rather like its picture quality. As for DTV broadcasting, why would cable companies want to try to convert? They are just now starting to roll out cable internet service which is pretty profitable for them. DTV over coax would be difficult at best due to bandwidth problems. Right now only microwave satillite has the capacity to stream 19Mbps per channel to everyone on your block. Cable companies would have to overhaul their whole coax network just to match the bandwidth. TV manufacturers are making quite a profit building relativly cheap TVs that have coax/RCA connections that have much higher profit margines than digital TVs. Even if a lot of people could afford the TVs and service, how many people does the FCC think would buy it? Cable on a good day only comes through to 55% or so of the country, what happens to everyone who can't afford DTV? Oh yeah, broadcasters CAN as an option broadcast NTSC...does that seem like a bullshit plan to anyone else? Simulcasting is expensive, there would be 5 minute commercial spreads just to cover the price of the double broadcasting. I can imagine broadcasters are as aprehensive as the cable companies for the same reason. Digital broadcasting needs entirely new equipment and that equipment costs money. What was the FCC thinking?

  • Re:Why do I want digital TV? (Score:4)

    by Rombuu ( 22914 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @06:03PM (#1388374)
    The FCC's mandate to oust black and white from the airwaves so soon is just a bonehead idea in my opinion. Color TV is an upper class toy than something beneficial to everyone. Look for example at the prices of the color TVs, they are thousands of dollars, where the black and white 25" one I have was only a few hundred and I rather like its picture quality. As for color broadcasting, why would cable companies want to try to convert? Color over coax would be difficult at best due to bandwidth problems. Cable companies would have to overhaul their whole coax network just to match the bandwidth. Even if a lot of people could afford color TVs and service, how many people does the FCC think would buy it? Cable on a good day only comes through to 55% or so of the country, what happens to everyone who can't afford color TV? Oh yeah, broadcasters CAN as an option broadcast balck and white...does that seem like a bullshit plan to anyone else?

    Well, I'm sure you get the point...

  • Our Stupid Government (Score:4)

    by MillMan ( 85400 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @06:17PM (#1388375)
    I indirectly place most of the blame for this on our government. Long rant, semi-offtopic.

    The supply/demand argument works here, I think. Cable broadcasters aren't going to want to support (supply) digital TV (I assume they are referring to HDTV) until a lot of people have HDTV's (demand). As I remember it was a similar situation when CD-Roms came out. Software was pretty limited until computers started shipping standard with a CDROM drive.

    On the cosumer (demand) side: The obvious problem is that HDTV's are very expensive, around $3000 minimum. I've seen studies that have shown that very few consumers are willing to shell out more than 200 dollars more than today's analog/NTSC TV's for HDTV quality. Numbers can be distorted of course, but knowing the average American consumer, I'd have to agree.

    So where did the government screw up? There are three areas I can think of. One is the hardware in HDTV's, two is the current situation in the communications industry as influenced by the tele-communications act, and third are the timetables from converting all broadcasts in the country to digital.

    HDTV Hardware:

    The HDTV spec supports 18 different formats (different resolutions, progressive or interlaced, etc) and thus all HDTV's have to be able to run these 18 formats. More formats = higher hardware costs. Now, on the big TV's this cost can get absorbed easily, but what % of the population has big screens? All the people who have small TV's will have to pay just as much for that hardware. That's big money and helps to prevent the prices on small sets to drop below a certain point. In analog sets today, almost all of the cost is in the picture tube. Now, there is a large chuck in just the hardware.

    How did this happen? The leading electronics companies couldn't agree on what formats to include, and the FCC simply caved in to corporate big brother, and included them all. Almost as pathetic as the giveaway of the frequency spectrum for digital broadcasting. Gotta love those lobbyists.

    Communications industry:

    Deregulation has hurt a lot more than it has helped. Service and contend providers are increasingly concetrated in a few companies, to the point where we nearly have an oligopoly. Many areas still have legalized monoplies (the exact opposite of what should be happening in a market controlled partially by the government). So when you have a legalized monopoly, there is no incentive to upgrade the infrastructure when you can make plenty of money with what you have now. I've posted this same argument before in the form of "why is high speed internet access so expensive or unavailable." You can apply the same argument as to why most cable companies aren't exactly moving fast on digital TV.


    Timetables to 100% digital broadcasting:

    The year for 100% conversion (plus or minus a few years, don't have my reference handy) is 2006. Six years is not enough time. Billions upon billions of dollars of equipment and infastructure have to be replaced. New sets have to be bought. Some people cimply can't afford them. The FCC is trying to push this too quickly. Why they are doing this I don't know. Prices are falling but even in 2006 I think they'll still be more expensive than today's analog equivalents.

    In summary the FCC has simply caved into industry pressure and the results aren't good for the consumer. It's really unfortunate.

  • Videoway and the failure of interactive TV? (Score:4)

    by erinlee ( 98502 ) on Sunday January 09, 2000 @05:48PM (#1388376)

    I'm not surprised that digital TV hasn't appeared yet. First of all, current low-definition TV takes a lot less bandwidth than HDTV, and most cablecos and TV networks would rather have more channels than a few really high quality ones. Unless they are trying to cater only to the very wealthiest consumers, perhaps... who likely don't watch so much television.

    There's also some paranoia about changing the standards - I recall hearing two women in the mall talking about how the gov't was going to change the standards to digital TV, forcing everyone to get a brand new expensive TV set etc.. This was last summer sometime. TV is currently a friendly, non-demanding technology and the idea of making it "high-tech" is going to lead to similar FUD amongst the less technologically minded.

    Anyways the speech seems to be referring specifically to interactive TV rather than merely digital TV. But haven't most interactive TV experiments failed? The biggest project I know of was Videotron's Videoway [videoway.com] service in Quebec, and judging from the last annual report of theirs I saw subscriptions are dropping and the company appears to be phasing it out. No wonder the industry isn't too keen on it.

  • As everyone else has said: black and white TVs can still understand color signals. Nobody had to buy new ones when broadcasters switched. To contrast that, in 2006, none of your NTSC-broadcast TVs will work anymore.

    YOU WILL BE FORCED TO BUY NEW TELEVISIONS!!!

    That's the big difference, and it's why your argument is terrible (and sure as hell isn't worth a 4 score.)

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • Wired has an excellent article on this subject. It is a little old (Feb 1997) at this point, but as far as I know, still valid. Everyone should read this: The Great HDTV Swindle [wired.com].

    Here is a quick summary:

    Conventional NTSC signals are analog. Frames are broadcast more or less as they are, and the timing signal is embedded in the carrier. DTV is Digital Television. By digitizing the signal, you can do things like compress it to save bandwidth, include program information, add additional data services, etc. HDTV is High Definition Television. It roughly doubles the number of vertical scan lines being broadcast, yielded a significantly better picture. It also allows different aspect ratios, so you don't have to clip or letterbox a movie to broadcast it.

    Sounds real neat, right?

    Not exactly. DTV compression allows HDTV to be broadcast in the roughly the same bandwidth as current TV channels. It also allows compression of NTSC signals. Rather then broadcasting HDTV in a full channel, a broadcaster can compress the NTSC signal, broadcast that using only one sixth of the channel, and lease the remaining bandwidth to wireless communications providers.

    Given the limited initial demand for HDTV, what do you think the broadcasters are going to do? Waste all that bandwidth on a signal most are not going to use, or give us what we currently have and lots of extra money leasing their bandwidth? I know which one I would bet on.

    So, if you think you are going to be seeing a better TV picture any time soon, think again. Except to spend lots of money to upgrade your equipment, but with zero reward.

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