More bad omens for DTV.....

One of the more active Democrats in Congress overseeing the transition to digital television -- scheduled for TV Barn's 10th anniversary, Feb. 17, 2009 -- said on C-SPAN's "The Communicators" that "I don't remember" the new chairman of his committee, Rep. Henry Waxman, "taking an active role" in the subcommittee working on DTV issues.

So that's a bad omen.

The other bad omen, of course, is I just discovered the DTV transition is happening on the 10th anniversary of TV Barn.

Comments

[Garry]

The FCC has made a total mess out of the digital changeover!
I read that the planning for this started 25 years ago. If that's true, then analog only equipped TVs should have been banned 10 years ago, instead of 2 years ago. What's going to happen in the next few of months is that millions of otherwise working TV sets are going into landfills because no matter what anyone says, the converter boxes are a major disappointment. None of them appear to be capable of changing channels at specific times so they can be used with VCRs, even though Dish Network promised that their model would, but that model seems to be unavailable anywhere & that cable boxes from years ago were capable of doing so. There isn't a single VCR out there with a digital tuner, just DVD/VCR combos at insanely high prices. The cheapest I've seen one is around $240. As far as I know, there is also only one make & model of a hard drive recorder that doesn't need a TIVO subscription. It's also priced absurdly high. If all I have is broadcast TV & that's all I do have, I certainly don't need to pay TIVO a fee so I know what to program. The boxes themselves are poorly designed, with bad programming of their EEPROM control chips & the corresponding remote control units.
A common sense Congress would legislate a one year delay at a minimum to try to knock some sense into both the FCC & the converter box makers.

Yet one more government program totally screwed up by the laissez-faire crackpots of the eight year Bush disaster.

[Tom Wolper]

I got a converter box for one of the TV sets at home and discovered a flaw: if the converter box doesn't receive a signal in a set time, it automatically shuts off (actually it goes into standby mode). So if you set your converter box in the afternoon to a channel and then set your VCR to record a program that evening, you will find that your VCR recorded an hour of analog channel 3. The only solutions I have found are to do as Garry mentioned above and buy a recorder with a digital tuner or find a converter box without the automatic shutdown. And if you already used your government coupon, as I did, you'll have to pay full price for a new box (if you can find it).

[Shawn Levasseur]

Garry,

This was a mess not because of any "Laissez-faire crackpots". If any such "crackpots" were behind it, we wouldn't have had the problem we had. This goes well beyond any single administration.

The problems stem from the fact that the HDTV initiative was created by congress, under the premise that forcing everyone to buy new TVs would be good for the economy, the same way new computer models keep getting sold to replace slightly older technology.

Then the contest to define what HDTV was was held, full of politics in and of itself.

Never mind every other technological transition in TV, (B&W to color, single speeaker to stereo, etc.) all did not require a total trashing of the system that came before it. This was because the technology was privately developed, THEN FCC approval was sought out. The HDTV plan put the governmental cart before the technological horse.

Just look at HD radio. Existing radios still work just fine.

The HD mandates have also had unintended effects on broadcasting. During a time when ad revenues are not booming like they used to, broadcasters were forced to buy all new equipment for the transition. Mature businesses suddenly had thrust upon them expenses like they were starting from scratch. This forced at least one locally owned TV station here in Maine to sell out to a larger company.

[John]

I remember Al Gore when he was VP saying how great it would be for the economy only thing is we do not make any TV's.
I guess he was talking about it being great for China.
Millions of households will be without TV because the signal is so hard to get.
So many of my customers cannot get it at all and of those that do it cuts out all the time. Over the air digital does not work if you are not close to the station. My customers that cannot get it have never had a problem with analog and they all have the best antenna for the frequency of the DTV channels.
HD radio also does not work and i hope the Gov does not kill analog radio because it will kill radio.