Posted on 03/13/2007 1:40:29 PM PDT by my_pointy_head_is_sharp
President Bush and Congress would see their approval ratings soar if they bought every American a Plasma TV!
A co-worker of mine can get 11 digital stations on his, 9 of them are about 18 miles away and the other two 45 miles. This is with an indoor antenna.
It never got to appropriations. They've been trying to get changed over from the analog signal to the digital since the early to mid 90s. It allows 4 channels in the space currently occupied by 1, so in theory they could get 4 times as many companies leasing the airwaves. But every time the deadline for the cut over has been within a couple of years the whole converter box distribution thing would come up and they'd decide it was going to be too expensive so they moved the date, I can't remember if they've pushed the date 3 or 4 times.
I do the same - I watch "24" and South Park...and a few other scattered programs.
You're probably not far from the truth.
You know, I'm a TV slave, always been, but this year I'm studying in the UK, and I never got around to by a TV, so I haven't watched any since september (except the christmas vacation when I was back home). Don't miss it a bit! Now I get all this free time to train etc
With keypads, I think you can play the music to "Funky Town".
We're just a couple of Chinese missile or EMP bursts away from playing cards with our neighbors again.
It's just now being appropriated, and it'll only be for the ones that "need" it (ie don't get cable or satelite, and don't already have a TV capable of receiving over the air digital signal). Part of the delays is they were hoping the section of America that would "need" the additional converter would shrink, with all the various new stuff (digital itself, HD, LCD, plasma) happening in the TV industry they were betting the problem would fix itself. Turned out to be a bad bet. As you can see from people on this thread the people who have stuck to analog TVs receiving all signal over the air are people that aren't that into TV so the new stuff isn't exciting them enough for them to make the change.
Don't forget pie plates.
Our dorm TV had rabbit ears thusly adorned. It improved the reception from a triple image to only a double image.
By government decree all TV's made before a certain date won't work.
Tell me again why we need government?
They've changed the rules. You can still get a coupon or two if you have a TV that isn't hooked up to cable.
That's why I put it in quotes.
But understand we decided a long time ago that the airwaves were a public trust that should be managed by the government. That's why the FCC was formed, to rent out sections of the airwaves and supervise their use. And really this step isn't that far outside of historical norm, when TV was switching to color the FCC made sure the TV the color signal had to be receivable to black and white TVs, obviously they'd still show in B&W but they had to be able to show something, there was a competing color TV format that would have been completely unviewable on B&W TVs. They even went so far as to ban manufacturing TVs that were compatible with the non-NTSC signal (NTSC being the standard that worked for both types of broadcast and reception).
Now the big difference here is there's no real possibility of downward compatibility. You can't stick 4 channels in the space of 1 channel and have the TVs that believe that space should have only 1 channel be able to manage the signal. Analog TVs simply will not be able to process, on their own, digital signal ever, there is no alternate digital signal format they could use that's analog friendly. So they're going the other direction, give the analog TVs the things they need to be able to handle the signal.
Is it big government, yeah. Is it kind of stupid, yeah. Have we been able to see this handwriting on the wall since 1953, yeah.
I understand what you are saying but there I don't think the Framers intended that we have a Constitutional Right to Digital TV.
Let the people convert to the new technology on their own dime.
Analog only rabbit-ears bump.
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