Our TV is just a big dust collector. Other than the Simpsons, there's nothing worth watching anyway.

Watch TV? Although I have a satelite dish on the roof, I shut it down a couple of years ago as I don't watch anything on the tube. There is so little worth watching these days, I am better off picking up a good DVD from time to time so I can watch what I want when I want.

As for the HDTV replacement, I'll probably end up buying one, sometime around 2020. :-)

Put me in the 'never had one, never missed it' category, too. The closest I get is buying movie dvd's at Walmart.

I don't watch tv. I have spent years at a time not owning one. If I have to pay to watch the local news on the rare occasion I do turn it on, I'll just read the paper. What do they expect to get out of this?

There are a million thing we will get out of this.

A) Better TV. The Europeans have had better looking TV broadcasts than we have for over 40 years, since they picked PAL and we picked NTSC. You should see the Vikings games in HDTV. It feels like you are right there on the field.

B) More open radio frequencies. The move to digital will open up more spaces on the spectrum for emergency radio frequencies, since cell phones have been quickly eating up all the available frequencies.

The simple matter is it is time for us all to upgrade our shit. Congress has set these deadlines for over 10 years now, and we keep pushing them back because American's fear any change.

The American government has to set the broadcasting standard for the nation, otherwise you'd have equipment that only received Viacom broadcasts, or NBC/GE broadcasts, and there would be no one to regulate who uses what station. So when it comes time to upgrade, unfortunately the gov't are the ones that have to make the decision of when it gets done.

You people sound like luddites to me. "I don't need progress, I can just read my morning paper that is still carved in stone with a chissel." lol

Hey I've got cable this entry is a little unclear, do I still need a new TV?

NOBODY will need to buy a new TV.

If you have cable, you'll be fine. Your cable box will process the signal for you.

If you only watch free, broadcast TV, you'll have to buy a converter box, which will be a like a small cable box, for like $10, and plug it into your TV to covert the digital signal into analog for your TV.

Simple as that. Welcome to the 21st Century.

Is this similar to how TV works in Britain?

Glad to hear my very basic 8.95/month cable is safe for now.

No TV is the same in Britain as it is here, they just use a better format for broadcasting (think betamax vs. VHS, the US picked betamax as the national standard)

The one thing they have in Britain we don't have here is a broadcast TV tax. You have to pay like 200 pounds a year just to own and use a TV to watch "free TV."

The seminonymous Doug: "Other than the Simpsons, there's nothing worth watching anyway."

The Simpsons hasn't been worth watching for quite a while. OTOH, Battlestar Galactica, NCIS, CSI, Lost (or so my wife tells me, at least), Mythbusters, the NFL, the NHL, and a few others are worth watching. Since I get none of these at the usual broadcast frequencies, I'm not so worried about the government's decision. I just hope the cable companies go to a letterbox presentation rather than a pan-and-scan presentation on their downconversions.

CCK: "The one thing they have in Britain we don't have here is a broadcast TV tax."

Well, they also have detector trucks that drive around looking for unathorized TV use. So I guess that's two things.

Battlestar Galactica???

Must be a cable show.

CCK,

I hate to get into a religous war, but NTSC vs. PAL isn't all that settled as to which is better. PAL has slightly more resolution, a better framerate fit for movies (and this is the main reason most folks think PAL "looks better"), and doesn't have quite the ugliness of the color burst hack, but NTSC been a remarkably successful format and extremely cheap to produce for years and that's why it's still here.

As to HDTV, have you looked at live broadcasts with it for things like the news and whatnot? I prefer to watch the cheap sets and bad makeup in NTSC where it doesn't show so poorly.

I'm not a luddite -- I've had satellite with a progressive scan monitor and wasn't all that impressed (dropped back to regular cable) and I'm designing analog circuits in 90nm and 65nm technologies that you *will* be using in a few years if you use a computer. That said, I'm still somewhat leery of HDTV and its ilk. I worked on that back in the early to mid-90s and the idea was nice, but the technology wasn't there to drive it to a reasonable price point for the bandwidth and processing required to give a reasonable digital picture: your $10 is missing a zero at the end for what's available now, although I expect it to drop into the $30 range by 2009.

Frankly, by 2009 we should be there in terms of technology and volumes but we'll have to have a huge infrastructure rebuild and I don't think you're taking into consideration the costs that are associated with the switch. Somebody's going to have to pay for all that equipment to switch over and I don't look forward to seeing more commercials to pay for all this.

So color me at best ambivalent about the switchover. We need more spectrum and the switch to digital would give us that *if* we don't use it for HDTV (note the relative bandwidths of the two signals are nearly the same for MPML HDTV). But the TV signals are in a pretty sweet design spot, so the politicians are convinced they can get a nice windfall by auctioning off the frequencies they're going to reclaim.

the whole "digital" picture thing is one of the biggest scams ever. There is no reason why an analog signal can't give a crisp picture and sound. No reason what so ever. It's a sham.

Cleversponge,

You're right, there's no technical reason we couldn't give as good a picture with analog broadcasting as digital. But there are reasons to go with digital: bandwidth. When you do digital TV you can do compression of the digital signal so you can pack more channels in the same bandwidth. For example, the signal you watch today takes something more than 7MHz of bandwidth per channel, but the equivalent digital broadcast takes less than 1.5MHz. Now, since there's only so much radio spectrum out there you get a choice: do you want many television channels (or a few at higher resolutions) *AND* lots of cell phones, or will you give something up? There's a finite amount of practical bandwidth out there and we're rapidly running out.

The real story of digital TV is kind of complicated. In addition to traditional compression we actually do a convert the signal into the frequency domain, throw away most of the high frequency signal [since your eye isn't all that sensitive to it], do motion detection and encoding of adjacent frames [only sending complete frames relatively rarely], etc. It takes a pretty fair bit of encoding horsepower and memory, and even the decoding end is more thna a 386 can reliably handle. Specialized hardware does better, but it still takes a nice fast ASIC and something more than 2MB of memory to do the "main profile" decoding standard.

Good grief, nerdbert. What you're telling me is that we're going to be using more technology to watch a TV signal than it took to send men to the moon....???

"...we're going to be using more technology to watch a TV signal than it took to send men to the moon..."

Your blender probably has more advanced technology than what it took to send men to the moon. Note that I consider this praise of the moon program. What they did with the available technology is amazing.

The truth is that this affects very few people. Over 90% of households with televisions are using cable or satellite and the remainder are like Mitch.

Recovering the bandwidth is necessary to enable more wireless Internet, cellular, and public services frequencies to be made available. The frequencies used by TV travel really well and will be valuable for those services. Broadband Internet in your car? Stream TV to your cell phone? That's what those channels will be used for.