[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by MelodyMaster

Analog TV in general is 80 years OLD! Think of that. Even the current NTSC scanning standards were codified in 1946. We have to move on. Everything else is digital, not that that's necessarily a good thing. But with the population of the planet and bandwidth requirements to feed that population being what it is, the much more efficient use of bandwidth provided by digital rather than analog is now a necessity.

Baseband cable is still analog, the cable provider uses digital receivers for the front end and converts the signal to standard NTSC for old fashioned viewers like yourself.

High Definition TV is very pretty, a movie screen in your home. If you had a digital set and convertor you wouldn't raise these questions. Of course there will be hiccups over such a radical change in technology.

Why shouldn't they add the suffix "-DT" for their Digital service? After all, stations have long used the suffix "-TV" to distinguish between television and radio service.

There are more so-called "old-fashioned" TV viewers in this country than you might think. Not everyone can afford a high-definition flat-panel TV and some cannot even afford a converter box. I am one of those who cannot afford a large flat-panel, although I could get a smaller set tomorrow if I wanted one with a 15" picture. There was an article in the paper here a week or so before the DTV transition in which a man in a suburb of a large U.S. city said that he could not afford a converter box for his old analog TV because he is on disability, which means he must now go to a friend's home if he wants to watch anything (even the news) on television.

Even those folks who can afford a converter box are not always able to hook up the box correctly or set it up, and some are incapable of understanding that an external antenna is required for proper operation of the box, despite the incessant warnings and everything else in the days and weeks leading up to the transition. The idea of disturbing the wiring in back of their televisions scares some people (they are afraid they might be shocked or killed by electricity on those cables) and puts off a lot of others. Most non-technical people do not know anything about their televisions other than how to turn them on and off, change channels, turn the volume up and down and mute the sound. Digital television has managed to thoroughly bamboozle these people, many of whom have no idea what DTV really is (and let's face it, most non-technical viewers couldn't care less about the behind-the-scenes side of digital)--despite all the PSAs (public service announcements) and print ads about the transition in the months leading up to it. I can imagine the scene in a lot of American living rooms from coast to coast the day after the transition, when they turn on their old (or not so old) analog television sets and see nothing but snow on every channel, even those channels which are supposed to be local to their areas. I can also imagine the large numbers of telephone calls TV repair shops across the land must have had up to closing time on 06.12 from people who found that they could not get their local TV channels anymore, and they wondered if the TV set was broken or if lightning had hit the antenna, the antenna itself was bad, etc.

The digital transition is still causing enough problems for some viewers in large cities such as Chicago and Philadelphia that the TV stations in those cities have applied to the FCC for temporary authority to increase their transmitter power, so their digital signals could reach viewers using antennas in far-suburban or fringe areas. I sometimes wonder why these people don't get cable or a better antenna, as it is not easy for a TV station to get FCC permission to do anything to its signal, and the stations certainly cannot simply raise their transmitter power on their own just because some small number of viewers in far suburbs or in the fringes out in the middle of nowhere are not getting them in digital. Most non-technical viewers do not understand that, thinking that all a TV station has to do is turn a knob on the transmitter and presto, the station will instantly reach from Maine to Miami with a city-grade digital signal.

We AKers know and respect this (that such a scenario as I just described is utterly impossible), but trying to explain this to most non-technical people will get you nowhere, in many cases. Many people will not get cable (even basic, what I call "bare-bones" basic, which is local channels only and is the lowest, least expensive level of service offered by all cable operators) because they claim it is too expensive. Don't try to sell these people on satellite, as you will probably get the same response (even though, in many cases, satellite is even cheaper than cable), possibly being followed by an adamant "No one's gonna put that ugly dish thingamajig on my house!"

What can you do? If someone can't afford or doesn't want cable or satellite, and doesn't understand why their TV doesn't work with just the antenna, there's nothing we can do. Many people refused to believe, in the last weeks of analog TV, that the day would come when their televisions would no longer operate with just an antenna connected, despite the warnings in the PSAs and even a few actual half-hour programs produced by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), detailing what viewers had to do to be ready for the digital transition on June 12 this year. A television station in Cleveland, a year or so before the transition and continuing until the bitter end, really pulled out all the stops to be as certain as humanly possible that everyone here in northeastern Ohio was aware of the digital transition by 06.12; its public-awareness campaign used the phrase The BIG SWITCH which showed on TV screens across the area, in letters darned nearly impossible to ignore; a banner carrying that phrase was shown, I swear, every chance the TV station got. I must say, I got tired of seeing this after just a short time (it ran on Cleveland's CBS affiliate and also on another local station owned by the same company) and am glad the whole thing is over. Except, that is, for the shouting, meaning the loose ends the FCC is still trying to tie up with reception problems and assisting those folks having trouble hooking up their converter boxes.