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.
Uh, huh... (Score:4, Interesting)
And all those obsolete TVs will be dumped in the third world for scrap prices. Going digital might be nice as long as it doesn't destroy the environment and set the third world further back.
Re:Uh, huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uh, huh... (Score:5, Funny)
Chuck Norris always wins over entropy.
Re:Uh, huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, many of those TVs will probably have people buying a digital-to-analogue reciever for $25-$50 because (as CRT tvs become harder and harder to find) it will be cheaper than upgrading your TV to a reasonable sized LCD/Plasma TV (as a guess, $250-$500 for a 25-30 inch LCD TV).
There are millions of people who live on less than $25,000 per year in North America and they are probably not going to rush out to spend hundreds of dollars on a new TV.
Re:Uh, huh... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I know of two cable guys who would disagree with that statement. They'd point out that there are probably more people who earn less than $25,000 in the inner city who own new HDTVs than you'd find in most middle-class neighborhoods. And by the time 2009 comes around these television sets will be even cheaper, assuming people dont just get adapters. I just hope that in the US we don't start seeing tax dollars go to handouts to provide assistance to people who supposedly can't afford a brand new TV set.
Sorry to disappoint you... (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost a guarantee that they'll be tax breaks for buying a new set or converter.
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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 Super
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Well, I know of two cable guys who would disagree with that statement. They'd point out that there are probably more people who earn less than $25,000 in the inner city who own new HDTVs than you'd find in most middle-class neighborhoods. And by the time 2009 comes around these television sets will be even cheaper, assuming people dont just get adapters. I just hope that in the US we don't start seeing tax dollars go to handouts to provide assistance to people who supposedly can't afford a brand new TV set.
Ah, the good old "poor folks often have expensive gadgets therefore their benefits must be excessive" claim again.
You've just got to think laterally to spot the flaws:
- you don't know how that equipment's being paid for. Is it rented? Is it on an exploitative finance deal?
- if you don't work, and sit at home all day, a TV is a good investment
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You sure were quick to defend those maligned poor folks,
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Realistically, I think we're both making prima facie statements, but to suggest that TV payments might be "handouts" might not be so
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I just hope that in the US we don't start seeing tax dollars go to handouts to provide assistance to people who supposedly can't afford a brand new TV set.
I keep hearing that there WILL be some type of government assistance to get new digital to analog converters. I keep hearing this in the news. Sorry I don't have a link handy. But, it really wouldn't surprise me if the television companies pushed for this kind of hand out. Otherwise, they are potentially losing viewers. Also, I would think such a handout would generate lots of public interest in HDTV and would increase viewership. This would benefit the TV companies.
Plus, they'd be asking Congress to give
Another option for NTSC televisions (Score:3, Interesting)
I assume, and this might be crazy on my part, that all of the stations that the obsolete TVs used to receive will be blank or raw static. In this case, people who set up illegal small area broadcast stations are getting a free communications medium along with an attentive audience. Play videos such as Hollywood films (if you're already illegal due to your broadcasting, then what d
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And all those obsolete TVs will be dumped in the third world for scrap prices.
Actually, no, they won't, because people here aren't stupid. To get digital TV, you buy a digital TV set-top-box for knock-down prices and plug the handy SCART cable into the back of your existing analogue TV. You can pick them up in supermarkets for next to nothing [tesco.com], and there are no subscription fees (at least in my country).
Where did this whole oh-noes-I-need-a-new-TV thing come from, anyway?
Re:Uh, huh... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Uh, huh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even so, I'd argue that even if you stuck with 4:3 SD and a built in mono speaker, a Freeview box is worth it for:
- FilmFour
- Some of E4 and More4
- Some of BBC3
- BBC4
- BBC News 24
OTOH, it is true that DTV provides a strong incentive to upgrade your TV. Just wait til FTA terrestrial HD comes along...
The TV's aren't obsolete (Score:2)
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I suspect that Cable providers might want to continue to use analog networks as long as they can. This one feature that Satellite companies cannot compete against - in a big way.... If I have one 'main' TV in the living room with a Digital converter I can still have TV's in all the bedrooms that receive analog. Satellite providers do not provide analog, so would need converters for each TV.
I just can't see cable providers willingly give up this advantage as long as it remains something that co
Re:Uh, huh... (Score:5, Informative)
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Win win? Barf! (Score:2)
You're ill informed. "Storage" of obsolete crap means dumping it into a landfill, where the heavy metals leach into the groundwater. A single TV set contains five pounds of lead!
And that's the best scenario. Most often they burn the electronics in order to recover the copper in
Wrong again (Score:3, Interesting)
The huge amount of lead (much more than half the weight) that a TV contains is in the form of lead-glass.
The lead-glass is not ever going to be diluted by water, so that's a complete non-issue.
There are other sources of lead, like the solder used, but it's not that large an amount, lead isn't very soluble in water and all landfills have a watertight membrane underneath to keep the nasties out of the ground water.
Don't worry about it.
That said it's a bit silly to scrap tvs just because t
"Single TV"; RF output? (Score:3, Informative)
Digital TV doesn't make a single TV obsolete.
But it does make multiple TVs in one house obsolete. A household would need one ATSC receiver per TV.
You don't need a new TV for digital any more than you did for VHS or for NES.
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 a
No they didn't (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No they didn't (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, typical cable networks have about 32 analog channels and around 60-90 digital channels of which some are in premium packages.
Cable companies are agressively marketing their digital packages with offers for free receivers, free premium channels for several months when signing a contract, etc.
They are complaining that 15 euro per month (the typical price for analog plus the digital base package) is not covering the cost and that the income from the average subscriber has to be doubled in the upcoming years.
So, what I expect to happen is within a year they announce that "their digital offering has been a big success" and they cut back the number of analog channels in the base package to use them for more premium channels. Existing programmes will still be part of the base digital package for a while, but when the number of subscribers to their premium packages (which often are 10 euros each) is not increasing rapidly enough, they will move some of these channels that traditionally were in the base package (like Discovery, Nat. Geographic, etc) over to a premium package.
After a while there will be only about 12-16 analog channels left (which the cable companies today have to provide by law) and when "almost all" clients have been forced over to digital this way, the analog package can be dropped just as easily as happened with the terrestrial transmitters yesterday.
("there are only 74.000 viewers left so why bother")
2011? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does the 2011 prediction assume that the US won't push the date back again? Does it assume that the reasons for US politicians to push the date back don't apply to politicians in other countries?
The conversion from analog to digital TV is in progress. Trying to guess now when the tipping point will actually occur is useless.
really should be DVB tell me why ATSC ? (Score:2)
DVB-T is the standard adopted by Europe and Asia (and perhaps other places as well?) for Digital OTA broadcasting, while ATSC is used in the U.S.A., Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan
you can do HD over DVB I have seen BBC trials...
I can buy lots of DVB equipment from usb sticks that are linux/MacOS/Windows laptop compatable to PCI cards and custom decoders
its feaking everywhere
what are the options for ATSC ?
why ATSC technical reasons ?
Re:really should be DVB tell me why ATSC ? (Score:4, Interesting)
ATSC requires less energy to transmit than DVB-T, due to the use of 8VSB modulation rather than OFDM; hence it is cheaper to use. If the USA were as densely packed as most of Europe, then DVB-T would probably be a slam dunk, but we have vast rural areas, and idiotically-built suburbs, and the TV signal needs to reach its audience at a cost that the broadcasters can sustain.
ATSC = Red State TV. (Score:3, Interesting)
For Oldies (Score:2, Funny)
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?
the future is changing? (Score:2, Interesting)
The scariest part of this article: (Score:2, Insightful)
This is more death of free media. If the only FTA transmissions you can get are either state-sponsored or state-supported, how can you reliably get news?
I sincerely hope that, once the analog broadcasts are halted in this country, the co
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.
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.
In the US (Score:2)
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ABC, NBC, etc. aren't broadcasting local news every night at 6 and 11 (and national news at 6:30) because they think it brings in more viewers than another Survivor knock-off. They do it because they're required to. They'd cheerfully dump their expensive news-gathering organizations if they could. In fact, th
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The analogue broadcast that was switched off was these same handful of channels - which will now be FTA on the (as of yet crappy) digital network. The commercial channels were never broadcast on the analogue network at all.
If you splash for a dish, you can get a card that will decrypt both the public broadcasters as well as the commercial channels for a one
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:In praise of state-supported channels (Score:5, Insightful)
People who wear tweed coats are probably on average more well-informed than people wearing denim shirts with name patches, but that doesn't mean that putting on a tweed coat will magically make you smarter. It might be self-selective earlier on in the chain somewhere.
Fox News didn't exist a decade ago, and now it's the top cable news channel, beating out CNN. A whole lot of people chose to watch it. That underlying preference for the viewpoint that Fox espouses is what separates Fox viewers from PBS viewers. And that preference is probably closely linked to a lot of socioeconomic factors like income level, education level, and occupation, all of which could cause people to be more or less well-informed. Unless you control for all those factors, you can't say (and shouldn't imply) that Fox News makes you stupid. It might be that Fox News' viewers were stupid already.
Looking at the study you linked to (which is by SourceWatch, which I'd argue is somewhat liberally biased) was specifically considering 'misperceptions' concerning the Iraq war and other politically sensitive issues; ignoring the fact that people may in fact be choosing to hold those misperceptions more or less consciously. People are quite capable of believing fervently in things they know not to be true, or at least ought to suspect are not true; to say that something about Iraq is a 'misperception' ignores that someone may decide to support the war in Iraq first, and then choose to believe whatever information best substantiates their already-chosen stance. (On the other side, I know quite a few people who probably believe that G.W. Bush is worse than Hitler and eats a steady diet of nails and raw babies; any information that might detract from this image is quickly ignored.) I think the psychological term for this is confirmation bias [wikipedia.org]. Really, to convincingly show which group of people were more or less informed in an abstract sense, you'd probably want to ask about politically neutral issues.
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But you can compare coverage of stories side-by-side, and see who got it wrong more often, statistically. Or who interjected more obvious bias more
There is no such thing... (Score:2)
As for the torrent machine, I've started to do that. I don't consider it piracy. I consider it time-shifting. I only wish that torrent worked better for non-popular content. My Mork and Mindy download is going to take 854 more days. Sheesh!
Do you relize that (Score:3)
In fact, you can corolate the entertainment news begining pretty much when the government stop giving money to the big broadcasters.
So money from the government does not mean government control. Sure, you need to watch thibngs like this, but don't make assumptions.
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.
Considering the size of the country (Score:3, Insightful)
No More Analog! (Score:2)
In the states we have HDTV signals in the air and all you need is a HDTV tuner to pick them up. So, answer is, they are hosed unless they have a digital tuner, assuming of course that the digital signals are transmitted.
I think the verb is the wrong one. (Score:2)
IMarv
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Digital signals don't work in cars: doppler effect (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably mucho DSP power will eventually compensate, but don't expect portable units to pick up digital TV signals terribly well if they are moving for at least the next several years.
They the Analog TV (Score:2, Funny)
Very few external ATSC converters anymore (Score:2)
Of course, by FCC mandate [wikipedia.org] all new TVs regardless of size are supposed to have an ATSC tuner in them starting March 2007. So the market for set-top boxes will be very small until 2009 at least, and even then will most people have swit
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.
Digital TV is far superior (Score:2)
The digital signal is really quite excellent. Analog signals have always been snowy, fuzzy, and filled with distortion. The digital signal is clean and crisp. I don't even have some special antenna either, I chinced out and cut off the shielding from an old c
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...as long as you don't know what the artifacts of overly-compressed digital video look like. If you do, it can look absolutely awful.
Good digital is far better than good analog. Bad analog is infinitely preferable (to me) than bad digital.
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...as long as you don't know what the artifacts of overly-compressed digital video look like. If you do, it can look absolutely awful.
Good digital is far better than good analog. Bad analog is infinitely preferable (to me) than bad digital.
Like any other artefacts, you get used to them and learn to ignore them. Just as you learned to look past film grain and scratches at the cinema, the crackle and low frequency range of AM radio, the background hiss of FM, and the snowy effect of a bad analogue TV signal, you learn to look past digital TV's artefacts.
In a previous house, I had digital TV but a peculiarity in the wiring meant that every time the central heating thermostat clicked on or off, there would be significant RF interference hitting
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Is that kind of like Wiley-Coyote knowing about gravity, and suddenly being affected by it?
I actually see the effects of overly-compressed digital video all the time, as I have satellite TV. It's occasionally annoying, but not really a big deal. I haven't watched a lot of over-the-air digital TV, but I've yet to see artifacts, only poor signal quality from a station that's
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I love that you advocate a kind of activism. Have you got your gun yet?
In Other news, (Score:2)
The rise and fall of television (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, no one (in power) seems to really care if the public has access to TV or not. With the rise in expensive digital and HD receivers, and the mass obsoletion of literal tons of cheap, mercury-laden TV tubes, TV will become a luxury. Which, of course, is exactly how it started out in the first place.
We may even witness the death of TV as we know it. By the time analog TV is outlawed, will broadcast TV even be relevant anymore? By 2008 (if that date sticks, which it might not), household datapipes could increase to the point where people will start dumping TV receivers like they're currently dumping POTS lines.
(Go figure -- phones going wireless, and TV going wired.)
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Seems like Holland lost again to Germany, just like in every football match.
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No. It's digital now in many areas, and I would guess by far the largest part of the German population now only gets digital TV over the air (of course most probably use cable or satellite...). But it has not been switched of completely.
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Wether we (i'm Dutch) are big or small is a matter of perception. But remember, the Dutch own a large part of American real-estate (third largest investor, after Japan and Canada http://www.westplan.nl/nieuws/persberichten/nederl andse-belegger-vol-vertrouwen-in-amerikaans-vastgo ed.html [westplan.nl]).
And no, not all analog Tv's will end up in Africa next month. But you will need a digital receiver, tranforming the signal into analog.
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Re:It's HOLLAND (Score:5, Funny)
It doesn't, he's just bragging that he personally owns the entire state you live in.
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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.
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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'.
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I'm more of a Gonie than an American- a state even twice the size of New Jersey seems laughably small to those of us out here on the West Coast. But my real point is- radio waves do not respect borders....
Re:It's HOLLAND (Score:5, Funny)
So what?
Ending analogue transmissions isn't intended as a punitive or repressive measure, it's meant to save a laughably small amount of money by ending a service that wasn't really used much anymore.
All these foreign channels are available on their laughably small (analogue) cable networks, free for them to watch on their teeny tiny little TV sets in their silly little houses.
Re:It's HOLLAND (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's HOLLAND (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
ach, that's silly (Score:4, Interesting)
every major metropolitan area is served with numerous 5KW radio stations, and those below midband are predictably audible across the SMSA boundary almost all the time, which encompasses radiuses of 20 to 40 miles.
on such technical material are the frequencies, powers, and beam patterns of radio licenses calculated. this is well-trodden ground, the number of communications lawyers in Washington, DC is second only to the K-street melange of political lobbyists, and they all use the same polar calculations to insure that radio KRAP applies for a license they can actually get authorized and sell enough ads to make money on.
amateur and shortwave radio can be expected at various bands and at various times, to be useable for two-way communications worldwide.
the 20-mile limit of Doctor Crumb needs some documentation. Soviet "chord" jamming of the 60s had to be done at the 100 to 200 KW level to drown out the state-run shortwave transmitters of Europe and the US, clearly audible any hour day or night in the US, and with the european state stations running up to 250 KW, they still got listeners.
yes, inverse-square laws apply. so do good construction principles. in the 1920s, primitive tube radios were made with great sensitivity, and if you had a good set, there was no problem listening on one coast of the US to the other coast nightly. that usually requires better than a 1 microvolt per meter sensitivity, and just about any crummy one-chip radio can do that today.
I might buy 20 miles for UHF television, merely because this follows line of sight rules with no skywave. but you can erect a tower of 1 + (4/3 (earth radius)) = h in feet and place an antenna, and get the signal of a typical TV broadcaster 35 KW or higher for over a hundred miles on any production TV set.
no, it gets back to hunger for frequencies, the desire of governments to reassign these frequencies in costly auctions for big dollars, and a serendipitous moment of technology change they can exploit for the purpose to explain why analog commercial broadcasting is going, going, gone. if they ever wanted to get the REALLY big bucks, move the technology into their military nets and sell THAT excess bandwidth. in the US, the military controls 99% of all assignable bandwidth DC to daylight, and has not given up one single 400 Hz channel since the Communications Act of 1939.
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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 op
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Better watch out when you are in the Netherlands--a car or a portable TV may be broadcast at you at any moment!
Re:Back in the old days (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Back in the old days (Score:4, Funny)
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.
FM Origins (was Back in the old days) (Score:3, Interesting)
FM is something we owe to the late Edwin Armstrong, a former employee of RCA. In fact, he was pretty much on his own to get FM out, but was able to prove it to the FCC and actually had a frequency band allocated. Armstrong was hoping to make something from the royalties off his invention.
David Sarnoff (h
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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 reaso
What country? (Score:3, Informative)
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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.
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If Europe was just willing to suffer with reduced chrominance bandwidth and phase error for the last 50 years they could have had backwards compatibility too.
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The black and white signal is separate from the color signal in NTSC and PAL.
Just plain wrong... (Score:2)
Now we know how our grandparents felt when broadcasters switched to a color signal. Their old black-and-white tv's (which couldn't read the color signal at all in many/most cases) suddenly became excessively-large paperweights.
Huh? Black and white sets work just fine, and always have since NTSC was developed. The color signal standard was developed to be backwards compatible with black and white sets. Essentially the color information is transmitted on a different frequency, and the television combines t
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In fact we have just the opposite. A circuit in your TV called a "color killer" detects that the signal lacks chroma data and actually disables its interpretation to prevent you from having weird glitching effects from noise on the chroma channel.
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I'll spare you a snide comment and instead ask politely "Are you from a country that uses PAL as its TV broadcast standard?". What you said is pure nonsense for NTSC-land, like the USA and Canada. NTSC color television was designed specifically for backwards compatibility with b
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The switch took place fall of 1966, but you're right in that the 1967 season was the first with all shows broadcast in color on CBS and ABC - NBC was full color at least a year earlier as RCA wanted to sell color TV's.
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Maybe he is, but then he still would be wrong. I live in a "PAL country" (Germany) and we had an old BW TV at home until the late 80s or so. It had no problem showing the color TV channels in black and white (until it finally broke).
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"The wonderful woooooooooorld ooooooooooof color!"
It's not at all like back in the day when my neighbor brought home a car and my horse stopped working.
KFG
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Thanks a lot.
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Nobody watches "television" in their cars. (Score:2)
I was a bit baffled by this one myself. I know of nobody who watches "television" in their cars; just video. When we go to visit my mom (a fourteen hour drive) we aren't going to ask the five-year-old to play with his toy cars in a car seat the whole time. We pop in a Thomas the Tank Engine [thomasthetankengine.com] video into the DVD player and he's happy.
And, of course, the DVD players are digital already. Which, I suppose, is the whole
Re:Make up your mind! (Score:4, Informative)
We name ourselves (as a country) "Nederland", which is inhabited by "nederlanders".
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Re: (Score:3)
Unfortunately evolution is going the other way. When I was in school I built an analogue TV from parts (it was monochrome, and the screen was green, and it only recieved one station, but it worked!. Most kids today can't even take the back off a TV. How many could wind a mains transformer on the kitchen table, or make a voltage multiplier?
And dont start on walking to school...