ATSC television still has problems occasionally, even on cable systems. Time Warner Cable, the cable operator in my area, is supposedly completely digital now, but some of its channels act up from time to time. Case in point: I was watching a program on our area's ION-TV affiliate the other day, but couldn't follow the show worth a plugged nickel because the picture kept dropping out (leaving a blue screen), freezing and pixelating. (I have a recent-vintage 19" analog CRT TV with a digital cable set-top box ahead of it.) I think this may have been due to technical problems at the cable headend, the TV station itself, or even weather conditions at the time (I think it was raining or snowing when this showed up); difficult to tell now. I had a similar problem not long after Time Warner converted its systems (including the one serving my area) to digital; I was watching NBC Nightly News one evening and noticed the picture was freezing and pixelating like mad. I can only hope that once digital TV has completely taken over from analog, next year, that these problems don't happen more than once in a great, great while; it's no fun having your favorite show interrupted by aberrations such as pixelization or freezing in place for minutes at a time, not to mention dropping out entirely. Did analog TV ever have problems similar to this in the late 1940s-1950s, when the idea of transmitting pictures over the air was new?
