Digital Television may not be coming soon!

[Jeffhs]

I live just outside greater Cleveland, 33 miles east of the city. The TV and FM transmitters serving Cleveland are perhaps 45 miles southwest of me. Analog reception here is terrible (the analog signal from Cleveland's NBC affiliate on channel 3 does not reach here at all if you are using an antenna), as I've stated before, which is why almost everyone in my small town has either cable or satellite. If analog reception is bad, then it follows that digital reception with antennas will be worse or even non-existent out here, due to digital TV's "all or nothing" nature.

I do not think anyone is going to notice the difference if the digital transition date is pushed back yet again, especially with standard 4:3 aspect ratio analog TVs. The reception on most cable systems (including Time Warner, which serves northeastern Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania) is very sharp and clear, so the picture almost always looks like a picture postcard on a TV in good working order; it looks like digital already, IMHO. Just about every aspect of most TV stations' operations these days is digital anyway--from the networks to the affiliates, the STL [studio to transmitter] microwave links, the studio and production equipment, et al.--and the stations are already transmitting digital signals alongside the analog ones, so all that is really left is to decide on a firm DTV transition date and stick to it.

There are the occasional, inevitable system glitches that mar or outright eliminate some channels (or disable the entire system in a given area) temporarily, but for the most part cable is very reliable, giving viewers even in far-flung outlying areas city-grade reception "just like downtown", as the expression goes. When the digital transition occurs, whenever that may be, it will mark the beginning of a new era for television. Once the bugs are worked out (reception problems with antennas in bad weather, et al.), it will, IMHO, be an improvement over today's NTSC 4:3 system that will have been well worth waiting for.

[kx250rider]

In the Friday edition of the Los Angeles Daily News, there's a piece about Obama lobbying to have the deadline pushed back... I have mixed emotions about it. It would be great if they just forget it altogether, but if it's going to happen, let it be like a dental appointment and get it over with so we don't have to look forward to it.

We have bigger fish to fry in the economy, and we can't afford to give everybody free TV converters anyway when we can't even give everybody food & shelter. My mother was a teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District for several years in the 1960s, and she always puzzled over why some of the poorest people in South Central Los Angeles where she taught, would have no shoes, be malnourished, but when my Mother went on home visits, the family would have a brand-new color TV and a brand-new Cadillac (with empty gas tank). So I guess this is the logic applied in prioritizing the free digital boxes.

Charles