US Still Dithering Over Analog-Digital TV Conversion

Robin Ingenthron writes "As 2007 gets closer, the legislation to postpone mandatory transition from Analog TV broadcast to Digital is taking shape. Here's an idea - make the broadcasters pay to use the airwaves (they get both analog and digital spectrum for free). For that matter, why permanently auction the bandwidth to cell phone companies, why not rent it to them too? Each postponement keeps the Fed budget in the red, so consumers have a choice -- between analog (black borders on the sides of their digital TVs) and digital (black borders on the top and bottom of their analog TV)."

Re:baffling, can anyone explain?

[stratjakt]

They aren't permanently sold, they're licensed. The FCC is taking back VHF and UHF, after all. They couldn't do that if they were "owned" like property.

And they do pay licensing fees, application fees, they pay a huge fee to petition the FCC to increase their broadcast power and range, for instance.

Re:Here's a thought...

[Control Group]

To free up bandwidth. Analog TV is a bandwidth hog in comparison to digital signals. We could cram a huge number of other services in the spectrum occupied by analog television broadcasts today.

Digital != black borders

[sunderland56]

between analog (black borders on the sides of their digital TVs) and digital (black borders on the top and bottom of their analog TV)

Digital versus analog is NOT the same as aspect ratio. The two concepts have little, if anything, to do with one another.

If your television screen's aspect ratio matches the aspect ratio of the program being broadcast, you will have no black bars. If the two do not match, you will have black bars, whether or not the broadcast is in an analog or digital form. I've got a Sony 36" HD set at home that has a 4:3 aspect ratio screen - no black bars when watching analog TV (or 4:3 digital broadcasts such as Fox).

Side rant: if you watch NBC digital, you get #(*&^%# annoying GREY bars on the sides. On dimly lit shows, those grey bars are much brighter than anything else in the room - annoying beyond belief.

I'm at a loss here.

[phaetonic]

McCain's reason to help foot the bill to the tune of $1 billion is : "The nation cannot risk the further loss of life due to public safety agencies' first responders' inability to communicate effectively in the event of another terrorist act or national crisis," the draft legislation said.

Currently, my digital cable box gets both analog and digital signals. If I put the HD channel on by accident, I can hear audio but see no video. Therefore, people who can't afford a digital TV in 2009 can keep their analog TV and leave it tuned to the one analog channel for emergencies until they can afford a digital tv.

Re:baffling, can anyone explain?

[Anonymous Coward]

The beauty of 'the system'. Its wonderful how to corporate America has turned the radio into the worthless crap that it is. Although it is 'ours' LPFM is the closest thing the average person can get to having a station and even that requires you be a 501.3c, have at least a couple thousand dollars for a certified broadcasting studio, AND have applied in the extremly tiny window provided for us a few years back. And really who applied for this option when it happened? Fucking religious groups all across the country who already have a very tiny portion of the spectrum to their incoherent babbling. Meanwhile, ClearChannel owns the rest. Thanks guys. A serious movement needs to occur to take back our airwaves, [takebackthemedia.com] topple the power wielded over us by the FCC. [com.com]

This is also why media conglomerates want to make cable and satellite your primary avenue for enterntainment. Since they own those avenues. Own and control. I will never buy a satellite dish and i will never buy cable. I dont need them and i dont want them. KILL YOUR TV. Next step after this, the internet...

Re:digital broadcasts

[DHR]

Get a HD decoder card, and put an antenna up then.

Re:Sigh.

[entrager]

Actually, HDTV is 16:9 by definition. Look at the spec for 720p and 1080i, it's all 16:9. However, some channels actually do broadcast their HDTV signals with black bars on the sides. The signal is still 16:9, but the black bars are part of the signal. The Denver NBC affiliate did this with their news broadcast until not too long ago when they actually got all HD equipment. Now not only is the news all HD and 16:9, their freakin' traffic copter uses HD. They claim to be the only station in the country with a HD camera on their chopper. Wow... I got off on a tangent.

Re:And hust how

[DevNova]

The shape of the signal area can already be modified to some degree. If you ever notice a group of towers together, sometimes some of those towers are being used to cancel or limit the signal in a particular direction, so it is more or less possible to cover an entire state and only have minimal leakage into neighboring states, although the number of transmitters and towers needed to accomplish this would probably be very costly and reception at the borders might be a nightmare.

Re:Back to State's Rights

[w9wi]

The area over which a radio transmission causes interference is far larger than the area over which it provides useful service. For example, according to the FCC [fcc.gov], WSM-FM in Nashville provides service over a radius of 79km around their tower. WSM-FM would interfere with another station on the same frequency within 182km of the tower.

It's far worse on AM. Authorizing a station on 1210AM in Michigan to operate at high power at night [0] would not only interfere with the Philadelphia station in Michigan - it would also cause interference in Pennsylvania.

[0] Actually, there's already a station [fcc.gov] operating on 1210 in Michigan. However, this station is not allowed to operate at night, when it could interfere with the Philadelphia outlet.

Re:Back to State's Rights

[typobox43]

What would this do to markets like Kansas City, where TV and radio stations are heard across four states? Would it not be a challenge to get each of these four state governments to come to a decent agreement about the spectrum in question? If one of the states wouldn't authorize the frequency needed by a station, then how exactly do you expect to keep it out?

michael is full of shit

[LocalH]

"digital (black borders on the top and bottom of their analog TV"

That's funny, I monitor a digital terrestrial signal EVERY DAY that completely fills a 4:3 screen.

Digital doesn't mean HD, michael. You should have known that. There is digital SD (standard-def) too.

Re:Digital TV in flyover country

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"I do have a digital tuner and the digital broadcasts don't make the trip. I can pick up 1 station in a 30 mile radius"

That's because most digital stations in the country are at low power.

KWGN out of Denver is at 1/2 power, and I can recieve their signal on a 1st-generation digital reciever with a $9.95 pair of rabbit ears.

DTV rocks when it's at full power. Compared to analog, it travels further and provides increased quality.

Now if only the other Denver stations would move to a reasonable power level...

Re:No thanks, spend the money elsewhere please.

[maddskillz]

I do have digital TV, and I do get the odd intereference, but it is so rare as to actually complain about. It's easy to accept that, for the much higher picture quality.
As for channel surfing, you can't do it the same, but you can usually surf through the guide, and see what's on that way. I find it more efficient, since you don't have to wait and see what show it is. You can even check out the info to see if it's a good episode.

Re:Digital != black borders

[LocalH]

The grey bars are intended to lessen burnin on expensive plasma sets. Plasmas have worse burnin than CRTs, and the neutral grey helps mitigate that.

Not that it's not ass-ugly, that's for sure. But it might be better than turning on your plasma one day and seeing that the picture area outside the middle 4:3 area has the black burnt it.

This should definitely be an option in the receiver, however. Although this won't work with upconverted NTSC, as said upconverters also tend to have the gray/black setting, so you're likely to get a mix of grey and black bars.

Re:No thanks, spend the money elsewhere please.

[w9wi]

...which couldn't be done as well at the higher frequencies to which the TV networks are being moved. (I believe that has to do with the better penetration capability of the lower frequencies, while the relatively immobile TV receiver can use an exertnal antenna. But I'm not certain of this.)

Basically, television is being compressed into a smaller chunk of spectrum.

Under the old rules, TV used channels 2-69. When the digital conversion is complete, channels 52-69 will be removed from TV service. Four of those channels will be used for public safety; the rest will be auctioned.

I suppose on average, TV is being moved to *lower* frequencies. However, in many cases individual stations are moving *higher*. This is usually because when a new station is built, it prefers to use the lowest available channel. (oversimplification but reasonable) So, when time came to allocate second channels for digital, the channels that were most likely to be available were higher channels.

After analog is closed, stations will be allowed to move their digital operations to their current analog channels. The Nashville PBS station [wnpt.org] that currently operates on digital channel 46 will be allowed to move its digital operation to their current analog channel 8.

Higher frequencies penetrate buildings better, while lower ones cover a greater distance for a given amount of transmitter power. Lower frequencies also require larger antennas. (not good for, say, the handheld radio on a police officer's belt!)

Subchannels are a mixed blessing. Programming is VERY expensive to produce. In many cases it may be impossible to raise enough extra revenue by carrying two extra games to cover the cost of the rights to those games.

Re:No thanks, spend the money elsewhere please.

[jfengel]

I suppose it doesn't surprise me that channel surfing is slow. The point of compression is to make better use of bandwidth at the cost of smarter components. A regular TV only has to lock on to the signal; a DTV has to lock on and decode it. Theoretically that should take only a fraction of a second, but more on that in a moment.

I'm disappointed to hear that over-the-air DTV broadcasts are so full of stalls and artifacts in noisy environments. I don't have one myself, so I can't confirm your experience, but it's common in telecommunications to broadcast redundant bits (with a Hamming code, for example) and smear them out so that a burst event (like a lightning strike) still allows you to reassemble an entire frame.

I can see that effect contributing to slower channel surfing. If a frame is smeared out over one second, it could well take that long for the first frame to appear, no matter how fast your processing is, but subsequent frames still appear every 1/30th of a second after that. That'll definitely slow down an experienced channel surfer.

Durable interference will break that scheme, but the point of granting a monopoly is that you shouldn't get that kind of interference, at least not from man-made sources. Perhaps a better antenna would help. Or perhaps the FCC needs to take a look at who's dumping garbage into the radio spectrum near your house.

Re:Government should not support this

[El]

TV is also a primary source of information in the event of a natural disaster Right... 'cause everybody's TV still works when the power goes out! I think radio is the primary source of information in the event of a natural disaster, because citizens are much more likely to have battery operated radio than battery operated televisions!

In my opinion, we don't need over-the-air television at all!

2007?

[jav1231]

I still say until Wal-Mart can sell a digital TV for what Earl can buy a few cases of beer for, digital TV will be sharing the market with analog.

Re:Government should not support this

[typobox43]

That 15% number may not be as meaningless as you think. The current law states that the transition will be mandatory by either 2007 or when 85% of TVs are digital, whichever comes last...

Re:Sigh.

[hackstraw]

Why don't we have a modifyer for "Wrong -2" or something?

The spec in laymans' terms for HDTV can be found here:

http://www.triadtwcable.com/cableserv/images/SAHDT VFAQs.pdf [triadtwcable.com]

Re:No thanks, spend the money elsewhere please.

[Inebrius]

My experience is quite different. You first have to realize that not all digital is the same. For instance, the digital from my local cable company is overly compressed. I switched from Dish Network, to cable, back to Dish (1 month later). The picture quality for the cable was pretty bad - the first 100 analog chaneels were very fuzzy. The digital channels were better but not as good as I got off my satellite (near DVD quality). Others in my family have DirecTV which appears to me to not be as clean of a picture (less resolution from compression). Different people will get different results from their local cable co.

The picture quality and sound I get from the HDTV satellite feeds (Dish Network) are excellent. My HDTV tuner can also tune in the digital and analog over the air signals. HDTV OTA signals are the best of all since they are the least compressed and have the highest resolution, way better than DVD.

Be careful when comparing analog to digital. Digital has the capability to be better than analog in both picture quality and sound. The market will decide if we want more channels or fewer higher quality ones.

For more info, check out www.ilovehdtv.com

Re:No thanks, spend the money elsewhere please.

[Ironsides]

In my experience digital TV pictures are actually worse quality than traditional broadcast TV. Because the entire image is MPEG-2 encoded, even a tiny bit of interference can cause the screen to freeze or display brightly coloured artifacts.

That is not a tiny ammount of interference. DTV uses almost 50% of its bandwidth for Forward Error Correction (FEC). It takes a lot to take the signal off the air unless you are near the boundaries or reception, which with analog would get you a pretty poor picture anyway. As for the artifacts? That has to do with the encoder, not the signal. Don't even compare this to VCD, I work around these pictures every day and can see how much higher quality they are than regular TVs.

The delay? They new that would happen from the begining. If you know about Iframes, remember that they have to wait till they recieve one till they can actually start showing a picture. A half second delay at most under the current way of broadcasting. And yes, I do mean a half second AT MOST, unless you have a poor quality decoder.

Upping the bandwidth would not change this. Changing the LongGOP of the MPEG structure would, but that would require more bandwidth to keep the same quality. As for quality? They can set it from 19.4Mbps to 0Mbps for the ammount of bandwidth they use for a signal. 19.4 is way above DVD quality so don't diss it. What was probably happening is that they were reducing the ammount of bandwidth dedicated to the subchannel you were watching to another channel. Most stations will only use 4 sub channels at most under the current scheme of things. 4 channels being the most number of Standard Deffinition [720x480I] that you can fit into 19.4Mbps under most circumstances and maintain quality.

I timeshift digital EVERY DAY

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what you are talking about. Start understanding the broadcast flag before you bitch about it. It is only prohibited to move digital signals outside the box, time shifting them is fine. Note also that the FCC gave TiVo permission to move digital signals outside the box as long as it is done securely. See "Tivo-to-go".

Re:It was government's idea!

[Detritus]

It's the fscking government that's forcing the broadcasters to switch! It wasn't their idea.

Wrong. It was the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) who got the ball rolling on HDTV. This was their plan to keep Motorola from stealing "their spectrum". They had already lost part of the UHF TV spectrum (Channels 70-83) to the AMPS cellular phone band (800 MHz) and land mobile use.