Anyone watching and/or recording the death of analog?

[Geoff Bourquin]

2 of my antenna channels went dark on their analog side at midnight last night; KVOS-12 and KBCB-24. I recorded KVOS so I could see how they did it. (Had to wake up at 4:15 AM so no way I was staying up until midnight to watch it live). No announcement, no graphic on the screen, just *POOF* and it was gone......right in the middle of a commercial for acid reflux medicine. It sure is strange to see those channels blank after all these years.

[Carmine]

Originally Posted by Geoff Bourquin

No announcement, no graphic on the screen, just *POOF* and it was gone......right in the middle of a commercial for acid reflux medicine. It sure is strange to see those channels blank after all these years.

This has been very underwhelming. Of the three Detroit channels mentioned, only one of them was "really" a channel. The Toledo and Ann Arbor channels never came in that well, and when they did, they were just generic PAX and PBS robo-channels. They never had any live announcements or local/fun content. Good riddance.

Now channel 20 was a good one back in the 70s and 80s.



They carried a nice block of Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Leave-it-to-Beaver, Adam 12, Lost-in-space, etc. Or as Wikipedia says...

WXON aired cartoons, lower-rated sitcoms, off-network dramas, old movies, religious shows, an annual Variety Club of Detroit telethon hosted by Soupy Sales and live news updates. WXON offered live action Japanese sci-fi kids shows, dubbed into English such as Ultraman, Johnny Sokko and Space Giants. WXON also brought infamous cult favorite The Ghoul back to Detroit TV. As the 1980s progressed, WXON began acquiring stronger off-network sitcoms. It got a significant boost after WKBD switched to Fox in 1986. It was an established independent station by 1991 and was unaffected by the network affiliation swaps at the end of 1994. Until 1994, the station signed off at 1 AM, and signed back on at 5 AM the following morning. The station has gone 24/7 since.

After 1995, they switched to "WB", then to "mytv" in 2006. There was never any reason to watch them after they lost their independence. I can't distinguish one episode of "girlfriends" from another.

Even their sign-off/nightlighting is astoundingly boring. Nothing compared to the fun of watching Arnold Ziffel on a 60s Zenith Console you just dragged home from the trash in a wagon, circa 1985.

Ahhh, the good ol' days.

[Robert Grant]

I caught the shutdown of WGTE.

For some unk reason, I can't get to this via the search engine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTW-JUQQPRY

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Carmine

This has been very underwhelming. Of the three Detroit channels mentioned, only one of them was "really" a channel. The Toledo and Ann Arbor channels never came in that well, and when they did, they were just generic PAX and PBS robo-channels. They never had any live announcements or local/fun content. Good riddance.

Now channel 20 was a good one back in the 70s and 80s.



They carried a nice block of Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Leave-it-to-Beaver, Adam 12, Lost-in-space, etc. Or as Wikipedia says...



After 1995, they switched to "WB", then to "mytv" in 2006. There was never any reason to watch them after they lost their independence. I can't distinguish one episode of "girlfriends" from another.

Even their sign-off/nightlighting is astoundingly boring. Nothing compared to the fun of watching Arnold Ziffel on a 60s Zenith Console you just dragged home from the trash in a wagon, circa 1985.

Ahhh, the good ol' days.

The independent UHF stations in Cleveland were like that too. We have 43, 55 and 61. All three have gone from independent to networks: 43 with MyTV, 55 with The CW, and 61 with Univision. Channel 61 was a unique station in that, in the early '80s (1982), they began carrying the programming of ON TV, a pay-television service. The ON programming began at eight p.m. on our channel 61 and continued until the station signed off.

ON TV went off the air for good a year or so later (it really wasn't having much success, and probably losing money anyway; there were very, very few people in my neighborhood at the time who even had the special antenna required to receive the ON TV service).

ON TV was replaced in Cleveland by the Home Shopping Network (HSN), which landed on Cleveland's channel 61 in about--1987 or so (just a wild guess; could have been earlier or later than that). After HSN went exclusively to cable a few years ago, channel 61 affiliated with Univision and began carrying Spanish-language programming, as it does to this day.

The off-network reruns, old movies and so on the independent stations used to run are gone from those stations for the most part; they went off regular TV when DVD players became popular in the '90s. Now, with many classic TV shows and movies available on DVD, the former independent stations (most of them have since affiliated with Fox, Univision, Galavision, et al. or The CW) show very few classic programs (except I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show and a few [very few] others), but that's progress. I don't know what will happen to these independents--whether they will eventually go off the air (even in digital) and go exclusively to cable, or just what--but one thing is certain. Today's television landscape is nothing like what it used to be.

I don't know how many of us AKers get TV Guide magazine, but there is an article (the cover story) in this week's issue that talks at length about the changes which have occurred and will happen in the future to television. The cover of the February 16-March 1 issue (a double issue having two weeks of TV listings) boldly states, in large letters darned nearly impossible to ignore, Welcome to NewTube! The article has to do, as I said, with the changes in television technology which will revolutionize how we watch TV in the 21st century.

I read the article and was amazed at what is being done (and has been done already) with TV technology; some of these ideas were shown in cartoons years ago (witness The Jetsons), but in those days (1950s, early '60s; The Jetsons was on in the latter decade) these weren't even gleams in TV producers' eyes--it was all science fiction. There was also a cartoon in a late-1960s issue of the old Electronics Illustrated magazine that showed a picture (drawn, of course) of a suburban living room, with the TV (flat panel--talk about being ahead of the times!) hanging on the wall. A baby in a playpen was about three feet (more or less) away from the screen and was screaming in horror; no wonder. The TV was showing a test pattern bigger than life, from a local station, which was scaring the poor kid out of his or her wits. The letter to the editor above the cartoon, in which the writer talked about the future of TV forty years from 1968 (television sets which could be hung on a wall like framed art, for example), ended with the sentence, "Heck, even a station (test) pattern will frighten our children!"

Who knew, or could have guessed, 35-40 years ago, that flat-panel televisions would eventually become reality in many American homes? There are still plenty of folks (myself included) watching TV on 4:3 aspect ratio analog sets, so FPs are by no means the rule--yet.

The day will come, however--maybe not tomorrow, next month or next year, but eventually--when all TVs will be flat-panel LCD or plasma sets; the days of analog television and CRTs will be just a memory (except for AK's antique/vintage TV collectors such as Doug Harland, drh4683) when that day arrives. Shucks, even I might finally break down and get a FP HDTV before long; I see even the 22-inch-class sets are coming way down in price--I could get a FP set tomorrow if I were willing to settle for a 15-inch picture. My Sunday newspaper has ad flyers from Best Buy, et al. in which 15-inch Magnavox (Philips) FPs are selling for well under $200. I may (and probably will) wait until my XL-100 RCA CTC185 dies before I do that, though. By then I could probably get a 30-inch-class or larger LCD or plasma FP for the same price (or close to it) as the 15-inch Magnavox sets, although, living in a very small apartment (one bedroom), I could probably get by with a 15-inch flat-panel. However, I am still very leery of these sets because of their high failure rates....and of course when they do fail, it usually isn't cost-effective to have them repaired once the warranty expires. I would not expect any current FP to last anywhere nearly as long as either of my analog CRT sets (nine and 14 years, respectively).

Most television (especially cable) up to the TV sets themselves nowadays is all digital as far as signal processing, studio-transmitter links, the networks' feeds to the affiliates, etc. goes, even if the broadcast signals from the stations themselves are analog. I called Time Warner Cable (the cable provider in my area) yesterday, since I had a question as to how they received signals from local broadcast channels. The person with whom I spoke did not know the answer to my question, but she put me on hold while she referred my question to a technician. She came back on the line a few minutes later and informed me that TW does not use antennas to receive over-the-air (OTA) television signals from local stations for distribution on the cable system, but receives the stations' content from satellites, distributing said signals via fiber optic cables. No wonder my TV picture on local stations looks every bit as good as the cable networks.

Time-Warner Cable's northeast Ohio/northwestern Pennsylvania systems were converted to 100-percent digital a year or two ago. I'll be looking forward to June 12, when the TV stations' signals themselves are fully digital. I may not (probably won't) notice the difference on my analog set, but I'll be watching as the local TV stations in Cleveland shut off their analog signals, one by one. To date, only one station in all northeastern Ohio has already switched from analog to 100-percent digital (they made the switch on 02.17, the original DTV transition date); that station is WOAC-TV channel 67, a home shopping channel in Canton, Ohio (about 60 miles south of Cleveland). I think the others could have signed off their analog signals early if they would have taken advantage of going to analog "nightlight" service (unfortunately, they did not), which would leave the analog stations free to broadcast digital-transition and emergency information as needed.

[3Guncolor]

Jeff,
Most television stations are not available on satellite to cable companies and dish too. In each market Direct and Dish have a collection centers just like cable has a headend for the local stations. Cable/Dish and the Telco companies receive this programming either by a direct feed (fiber/telco/mirowave) from the stations master control or over the air with an antenna. Today that would be in most cases using an 8VSB receiver.
Unless you speak to somebody who takes care of the headend in most of the time you will not get correct information.

[rcaman]

wcbi tv in columbus had a bad lightning strike to their analog transmitter a few weeks back and they told us it would not be repaired since the cutoff date was so close. they have been digital for a couple years now. wtva in tupelo was supposed to shut down the 17th but i am on directv so i get it anyway. i am in the top northeast corner of miss. by the way wcbi came to our store and did a special on how to hook up the converter boxes. she told us about the lightning strike. their website has our clip on it. steve

[Arkay]

TV here has been broadcast in both analog and digital for a while. I don't have any means (yet) of receiving the free-to-air digital broadcasts, but occasionally watch the free-to-air analog channels. [I also get broadband channels, including the movie channels.]

I haven't heard of any plans to cut off analog broadcasting, but given the way they have added in the digital channels, I assume it will come one day.

Somehow sad, very sad...

Although I don't really miss the old days of having to deal with finicky rabbit ears that would tune perfectly, only as long as you stood there holding them, and then got fuzzy as soon as you went back to the sofa to sit and watch... but with a good antenna atop a house/building, analog is good.

All things must change; to everything there is a season; etc... but still, it seems rather sad!


R.I.P., analog television!

[Whirled One]

I actually stayed up on the night of the 17th (with some old TVs running, of course) just to see what would happen at midnight with the two local stations (WHO-TV 13 (NBC) and KDSM 17 (FOX)) that were still planning to shut off their analog transmitters. I recorded them too, but wanted to see it in person. Hey, it's history you know.

WHO-TV had been announcing that they were shutting off analog transmission at 11:59 PM, and that's just exactly what they did. Actually, I think they jumped the gun by about 1 minute. No announcement, no nothing-- just shut it off abruptly right in the middle of a bit on the Conan O'Brian show. I was able to catch the moment of the shutdown (using my digital camera's video mode) as displayed on my RCA 8TS30. I'll have to see about putting the video up on YouTube or somewhere.

KDSM, on the other hand, didn't actually shut down their NTSC transmitter per se. Instead, they switched the analog transmitter over to an endless loop of a 10-minute-or-so "DTV Transition Tips" program produced by the NAB, which essentially informs the viewer that (a) they need to do something if they want to continue to be able to watch OTA programming on this station, and (b) what to do about it. Actually, the looped programming consists of two separate videos, one in English and the other in Spanish. ...But the two versions are actually a bit different even aside from the language spoken by the host. KDSM is still running the "DTV Transisiton Tips" loop as I write this.

[AUdubon5425]

When I was in Atlanta I had nothing to watch ota on - mother only has a 32" Philips crt set my brother gave her 4-5 years ago hooked to cable. Playing with the sets in the thrift stores on the 19th revealed there's still channel 2 and four UHF stations broadcasting, but none were running any type of announcements.

I have five sets I'm going to set up and film the cutoff in June. We have seven stations still on the air in N.O.; the only one I know for sure that will wait until the new cutoff date is WWL-TV.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by 3Guncolor

Jeff,
Most television stations are not available on satellite to cable companies and dish too. In each market Direct and Dish have a collection centers just like cable has a headend for the local stations. Cable/Dish and the Telco companies receive this programming either by a direct feed (fiber/telco/mirowave) from the stations master control or over the air with an antenna. Today that would be in most cases using an 8VSB receiver.
Unless you speak to somebody who takes care of the headend in most of the time you will not get correct information.

I called Time Warner Cable again this morning (02.23.09) and spoke with a customer service representative who seemed a lot more knowledgeable about the cable system than the person with whom I spoke several evenings ago. The representative I talked to today told me that Time-Warner indeed does pick up local station signals via satellite (not with antennas). I mentioned to this person that I had read on the Internet cable systems do not have access to the same signals Dish Network, et al. receive. He then told me that Dish Network and other DBS providers use their own satellites, independent of the one(s) used by Time Warner Cable.

Regardless, I am very pleased with the picture quality on Time Warner cable. I was watching the news last night and was astounded by the quality of the picture on my RCA XL-100 CTC185 TV with an in-line, dark-tint CRT. The reception on TW Cable is so sharp and clear that I could even see the credits on another show I watched that evening, in which the letters were extremely small; no matter. I could still read them. As far as picture quality on nature scenes and the like is concerned, it is very, very good as well, like a good photograph or a picture postcard.

IMHO, the quality on analog TV stations is so good, I don't think I'll notice the difference on June 12 when analog shuts down forever. One station about 60 miles south of here has already shut off its analog signal as of about a week ago, but honestly, I wouldn't have known it were it not for a runner at the top of the screen, explaining that the station was ending analog transmissions. The switch may have occurred at midnight or shortly before, but since I'm on cable, I really don't know exactly when because, as I said, on an analog set it is almost impossible to tell the difference between an analog and a digital TV transmission; they both look the same, at least to me.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Here in Pittsburgh, Channels 22 and 53 went totally digital but channel 53 still has an analogue signal broadcasting how to set up your old TV to receive digital, first in English, then Spanish, then it repeats.