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Broadcast is dying.
I figure in 10-15 years, all TV will be delivered via satellite or cable. There wont be enough of us left using antennas to justify using up valuable spectrum, maintaining multi-million dollar transmitters, and using megawatts of AC power to run those transmitters.
The government will jam it down our throat, just like they have with ATSC.
If they let engineers and technicians make the decisions, we might be OK, but instead politicians and bean-counters do it.
How many people (who really know TV) believe that everyone who gets NTSC will get ATSC over the air? My $100 dollar Channel Master antenna gets 15 NTSC channels, 10 of them very well, 3 fair and 2 poor. So far I have been able to get one 1 (that's one) channel digital. (shopping at home 36 hours a day. Ugh.) I've tried several UHF antennas with no useful change in performance.
My signal quality has degraded in the last couple years, as I am now within a stones throw of a new Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Costco, and a sea of small stores filling the spaces between the big boxes. Every time a new store goes up, I see more herringbone, dots, and squiggles in my weak-station reception. I figure it must be interference caused by the hundreds of computers, lighting systems, and switching power supplies that are beaming their crud into my antenna.
So, between the NTSC to ATSC changeover and the interference from my ever-growing surroundings, I too may be forced to abandon over-the-air, and hook up to $50.00 a month cable. One more tiny blow to broadcast TV.
Then again, maybe I'll just dig out my 25 year old Beta tapes, and watch Police Squad and WKRP instead of Survivor. (y'know, I kinda like the sound of that!)
I'm done ranting now.
ATSC lovers, it's your turn
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