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A bill has just passed the US House of Representatives, which will require TV stations to broadcast in digital only beginning in February 2009. Which means that if you have an old style TV it will not receive anything over the air after that date. Congress is planning on offering vouchers to help purchase converters to keep our old sets running. But apparently the converters won't be free.
I have no idea where this is going to leave Canadians.
I have no idea where this is going to leave Canadians.
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glad
Rufus
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Re: glad
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Re: glad
Owww!!!
OK, sometimes.
;-)
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[Emily Latilla] Never mind. [/Emily Latilla]
There is going to be quite a lot of hoopla about this A to D transition over the next while, but I personally have to wonder just how much of an impact it will really have. The price of digital sets is plummeting, including HD sets, and I tend to think that three+ long years from now, most folks will have already converted. This whole thing could turn out to be much like the big scary Y2K disaster scenarios that ultimately never occurred.
The other question to be raised is that by 02/09, how many people will be watching TV via satellite, or even the internet-- all of which have their own proprietary transmission protocols.
I'm now making my own prediction here: There will be far greater consternation in the near future from viewers who now own widescreen sets and find that they have to put up with 'pillarboxing' bars for the 50+ years of old 4X3-shaped program material that's still out there, and will be for a loooooonng time.
There are solutions for this, but all involve some degree of expense, and greater expense than even a currently priced converter box for digital broadcasting.
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I've been watching the prices since then, so I know they've started to collapse. I'll probably get an HD next year sometime, depending on my finances.
The VHS recorder in my TV died amonth ago. I decided it was worth it to go out and buy a recorder to be able to play my dwindling tape collection till the new techonologies settle down.
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It will be expensive. I'll buy a new Palm. I've been waiting on that for a while because I'll have to upgrade software, particularly my filemaker program because I keep a data base of the books I own on my palm so I check to make sure I don't already own the book (I have a ton of duplicate copies).
This year I bit the bullet and bought the camera I've been lusting after. Next year (or the year after) for the computer
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1. Assign temporary new channel numbers for the digital stations. For example, in my area, the local PBS station transmits in analog on Ch. 33, and in digital on Ch. 36.
2a. After the changover (was 2007, now 2009, as mentioned previously) and all analog transmissions were ended, the original channels would be auctioned off for other uses.
2b. Or else, the stations would transmit digitally on the previous analog channel frequencies, and the temporary ones would be auctioned off.
(I'm still confused about the #2's, and have elected to not care either way.)
As to how to tell if a new TV has built-in digital tuning capabilities, look for the specifications to say "ATSC tuner included" or "equipped with NTSC/ATSC/QAM tuners".
NTSC = analog, the old system
ATSC = digital, the new system (also used by DirecTV & DISH Network)
QAM = digital cable system.
Yes, the cable folk have their own, and it's not compatible with ATSC. Cable companies will receive the original transmissions (in whatever form) and then convert them. For your TV to tune them, you will need either a box supplied by the cable company, or a TV with a QAM tuner. Fortunately, most current production TV's have all three tuners onboard.
One final note (yeah, right! ;-) about digital channels-- they can have "sub-channels", or channels within a channel. Digital is so efficient bandwidth-wise compared to analog that it is possible to fit as many as six channels in the space of one previous analog channel. The trade-off is in picture quality. Use all six at once, and you're about down to VHS tape quality. Do 3 and you're at DVD level. If you do full 1080i or 720p Hi-def, you get only one channel.
Some folks who already own HDTV's have noticed that the Hi-def doesn't always look like Hi-def, especially during the daytime. This is because the station "multi-casts" 2 or 3 channels at once. To do this, they have to compress or downconvert the Hi-def material in order to squeeze everything in.
Subchannels are denoted with a dash and a second number after the main channel number. For example, my PBS station has 36-1, 36-2 and 36-3 all running at once in the daytime.
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As far as I know the plan was to clear the really bandwidth-hungry lower VHF channel frequencies from the beginning. Then those frequencies would be sold for more efficient use for something else. (Which I think is why ABC dumped all of their lower-channel-numbered stations about a decade ago and reorganized with what had been independent stations in many markets. Whether that makes sense now or not I have no idea!)
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The cable company will surely take care of any converters you'd need as they already do for some customers in some areas.
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nothing new, really
In fact, the US is behind several other countries in the digital switch. 2 cities in Germany have already stopped having analog broadcasts, & the rest of the country will by 2010, the same year as France. Japan's supposed to do the same by 2011 & the UK by the end of 2012.
This info is from an article in Oct. 2005's IEEE Spectrum (http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct05/1911). (I know about it because I do proofreading for them.) A lot of the rest of what's in it is basically covered in OnM's post above, but anyone interested in more detail can check out the article. You may want to go to the end to see who they predict will be the winners & losers from the switch. They say less-well-off consumers will be losers in the short term but consumers in general will be winners in the end.
Of course, a lot of more-well-off consumers already have digital sets. Personally, I figure by 2009 those TVs will be available used. I'm gonna keep an eye out for that market!
Oh, & I searched the Spectrum article for "Canada"...it's not mentioned.
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The article is very specific about the end of 2006 being the original deadline for the end of analog broadcasting, not the requirement for all stations to start digital broadcasting: "At the time of the bandwidth loan, Congress set year-end 2006 as the date when analog service would officially cease and the extra channels would be 'returned.' " There may not have been a legal requirement to broadcast digitally, but broadcasters may well have considered it too advantageous to pass up & not needed any legal push to do so.
There's more detail in the article (http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct05/1911), a little more than halfway down the 1st page, starting w/"In the late 1990s."