The Dutch Kill Analog TV Nationwide 401
Willem de Koning writes Yesterday the Netherlands completely ended transmission of analog television signals, becoming the first country in the world to do so. So what about cars and portable TVs? I'm guessing a market will emerge for portable set top boxes / converters." The article mentions the timetable for other countries to go all-digital; by 2011 most or all of the developed world will have made the switch.
No they didn't (Score:5, Informative)
What? (Score:3, Informative)
Umm, what about 'em? I've been to Holland and I didn't see too many cars with analog televisions installed. Does it mean limos? Well that's a small luxury market that can afford digital receivers. Or did they also switch to all didgital radio and is that what it means?
Re:Back in the old days (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Back in the old days (Score:4, Informative)
Where are you from? In the US the NTSC color signal was specifically developed to maintain compatibility with B&W sets so that no one needed to buy a new TV if they didn't want to. I was under the impression that PAL/SCEAM were developed to do the same thing, but carrying the color information in a different way so it was more stable and immune to noise.
I know early FM radios don't work now (because RCA got the FCC to move the FM dial's portion of the spectrum in a deliberate attempt to kill the technology), but I've never heard of that with color TV.
Re:The scariest part of this article: (Score:5, Informative)
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get
public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations
with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
What country? (Score:3, Informative)
That's not what I was taught. (Score:4, Informative)
Finally RCA, which owned NBC, developed "compatible" color television sets. This is what became our "modern" NTSC sets.
And that's also why NBC was used to use a peacock and advertise itself as "an all color network." It's also why all Star Trek (The Original Series) episodes are in color, yet the first year of "Lost In Space" is in B&W.
Some answers (Score:3, Informative)
a) there are few, if any, cars with TV sets in them. The primary market for in-vehicle TV is for truckdrivers. These have had to deal with quite some advertising over the past year for both digital terrestrial as satellite sets - the latter make most sense seeing as most truckers drive internationally (being a small country, The Netherlands is one of the world's leaders when it comes to the amount of territory outside its borders).
b) portable TVs are fucked
c) digital sets are pretty much non-existant, for terrestrial digital you always get a set top box, as well as for (digital) satellite.
The article only mentions the 'cost per household' as a reason for switching the signal off. In reality, the reasons are even less enlightened:
- the only service you got on analogue was the 3 public broadcasting channels, the 7(!) remaining national channels (not counting theme channels like MTV etc.) were never on analog, but only on (basic) cable and (basic) satellite[*]. As such, analogue service was already a joke.
- In fact, gives The Netherlands small size, you were more likely to get good reception on German and English channels in a large portion of the country any way; the number of usuable channels was few
- Given this, they want to reuse the frequencies for more regional services, like wimax and digital radio (which is even less successful than digital terrestrial TV because of its poor coverage).
[*] That's 10 general interest channels (comparable to networks) on a population of 16 million.
Re:Back in the old days (Score:2, Informative)
The black and white signal is separate from the color signal in NTSC and PAL.
Re:Uh, huh... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Back in the old days (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's HOLLAND (Score:2, Informative)
No, it's The Netherlands. Plural, and with an article.
2. It's not a tiny country, Luxembourg is.
No, The Holy See [wikipedia.org] is!
3. Germany, Denmark, France and England don't broadcast in Dutch.
But Belgium does. Besides, we're used to US movies and series broadcast in English, albeit with subtitles.
Re:Make up your mind! (Score:4, Informative)
We name ourselves (as a country) "Nederland", which is inhabited by "nederlanders".
Converting (Score:3, Informative)
Digital Set Top Boxes are already cheap and small - you can even get one that's built into the form factor of a SCART plug (that's the European standard AV connector).
Just buying a STB and hooking it up isn't enough for everyone - depending on coverage for your area you might need to spend money on your aerial. Maybe coverage is more even in The Netherlands, what with its relative flatness.
STBs usually put out a composite video signal, so the analogue TV you're converting had better have a composite input. There are TVs still in use which only have an RF input. I don't know of any STBs that contain an analogue RFmodulator. If there's a market for them, it'll happen. RF modulation is cheap and easy -- I must have half a dozen inline modulators from 16 bit consoles lying around in boxes here.
I'll be really interested to see how the analogue switch off goes here in the UK -- a phased switch off beginning in 2008 -- my guess is that those stubborn enough to have resisted digital by the time their analogue transmitter is decomissioned will stand a good chance of being given a free/subsidised STB and aeriel upgrade.
Re:Uh, huh... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The scariest part of this article: (Score:5, Informative)
Any club of people that can raise a significant number of members will get
public funding and can participate in the public channel. There are broadcasting organisations
with socialist, catholic, buddhist, islam, etc. backgrounds, and they all get their voice.
In addition to this, you have to realize
1) public broadcasters also feature advertising
2) it has been known for a public broadcaster to become a commercial broadcaster (veronica)
3) workers from failed commercial broadcasters have been known to rejoin the public system (tv10)
All of this mitigates the influence of government. (And the government money mitigates undue influence from advertisers).
The public broadcasters themselves are independent member-run organizations and can (and have) defied government positions. More successfully than the BBC has managed, for instance (turns out they were right about reports about Iraq's weapons being 'sexed up', but they didn't have the balls to say to the government 'you can put in a complaint like any regular citizen').
Additionally, public broadcasters are required by law to have editorial codes that guarantee editorial/journalistic independence for their employees - independence from both the government, advertisers AND the broadcaster itself. The journalist's trade union is always keen to complain about instances of this independence being threatened.
Getting impartial/non-partisan news is hardly the problem. The problem is that the news is either boring (especially the christian broadcasters, always yapping on about 'church matters' or, for some not well understood reason, every minute detail of the troubles in Israel) or alarmist and/or xenophobic drivel designed to compete with the commercial channels.
Re:Back in the old days (Score:1, Informative)
In fact, the PAL system used in most of Europe is backwards compatible, too. If OP was refering to PAL, he was wrong.
In praise of state-supported channels (Score:5, Informative)
Does it really sound like the public is being served by the private media? Don't you wish we would have been a bit savvier when, through being misinformed, we supported our politicians in their attack on Iraq?
Re:Considering the size of the country (Score:1, Informative)
East-West: 2.5 hours.
- a Dutchman.
Re:It's HOLLAND (Score:4, Informative)
A quick search says that most US radio stations (and I assume tv stations) have a broadcast range of approximate 20 miles.
20 miles? Are you sure about that? I live in fairly hilly terrian at the bottom of a valley and can tune in even the low powered stations from further away then that -- using nothing more then a indoor wire antenna.
Re:FM Origins (was Back in the old days) (Score:3, Informative)
You may be thinking of the fantastic Ken Burns documentary "Empire of the Air", based on the book by the same name. I agree, it shows just how far he'd go. Armstrong offered FM to RCA (who he worked for). But the head of RCA was busy pushing his new baby, TV (which used FM for sound modulation which he HATED and refused to pay royalties on) and he thought (and probably quite rightly so) that American's couldn't afford to purchase both an new expensive FM radio and expensive TV. As I remember, the main reason FM got so successfully is that Armstrong basically gave it the military for free and they bolstered use and development (because it was so superior). Armstrong's FM eventually won out over AM as we all know, but he suffered patent fights for the rest of his life.
The clout to get the FCC to move an entire, in use, part of the spectrum is nearly unimaginable. Look at the interoperability hijinks and such that go on now that you think are bad, and just try to imagine one company getting the FCC to make every satellite radio useless overnight.
Re:No, sorry to disappoint YOU (Score:3, Informative)
I suspect the 2009 date was chosen due to it being just after the 2008 presidential election and far enough ahead of the 2010 mid-terms to have much effect. As to why February 17th was chosen, it's because it is just after the Superbowl and Daytona 500 and before the NCAA and conference basketball tournaments begin (that was a quote from someone in Congress from an article I read).
I'm sorry to say, but you need to adjust your cynicism to match reality.
"Single TV"; RF output? (Score:3, Informative)
But it does make multiple TVs in one house obsolete. A household would need one ATSC receiver per TV.
Most VHS players and most NES and Super NES models had RF output on channel 3 or 4. Most DVD players and the N64, GameCube, and Wii console, on the other hand, have composite and S-video and possibly component, but no RF. If the ATSC set-top receivers are anything like DVD players and newer Nintendo consoles, then people who rely on broadcast TV and have older TVs with only an RF input will have to add an RF modulator to the shopping list, and some RF modulators aren't compatible with the Macrovision copy distortion signal produced by DVD players and some digital TV receivers when playing "protected" video.
Re:Broadcasting in Dutch (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't realise you were referring specifically to packet switching. This was developed by a Polish-born American, Paul Baran, for the US Air Force, and independently by Donald Davies at the UK's National Physics Laboratory. A packet switched network was in operation here from 1970 to 1986, and it was Davies who coined the term 'packet switching'.
No need to dump your old telly (Score:2, Informative)
Actually I have a VCR that sits between the converter and the aerial so I can record analogue while watching digital. I'll get a PVR when they turn off the analogue signal.
Re:ach, that's silly (Score:3, Informative)
I have no idea why you're bringing skywave/ionosphere into this. Only the very lowest of US TV channels have any hope of "skip", and the FM frequencies have NO chance what-so-ever.
There was no FM radio nor TV in the 1920s. AM (MW) radio operates on VASTLY different frequency ranges, which don't have anywhere near the same propogation.
I get the feeling you just read a book on early radio, and are utterly confused about it...