I just read in the newspaper that all TV sold in the United States, actually anything with a tv tuner, sold after March 2007 will have to be equipped with a digital tuner. I see hundreds of TVs in stores none of which have digtal tuners. I can’t believe they will just throw out these analog (NTSC tuners) TVs.
I even went to Best Buy and Circuit City and asked and not one person in the store was even aware of the new law. So obviously the stores will just keep selling the old analog sets.
Is there more to this than the newspaper article is letting on. I searched the FCC database and found the rule, but it is not a simple site to search.
You (or the article you read) misunderstand the FCC ruling. It only requires that new sets designed and manufactured after March 1, 2007 contain an HDTV tuner. All existing analog-only NTSC stock, including those units not yet shipped to stores, is allowed to be sold out as usual; although starting in 2009, they will be useless without a set-top converter box for HDTV reception.
There is no such limit date for analogue NTSC transmissions in Canada.
If digital receiver boxes do not become inexpensive quickly, I predict bootleg TV receiver smuggling across the Canadian border to watch Canadian analogue networks, especially when they are retransmitting US digital networks.
Digital channels work just fine OTA. You might need to put in a digital set top box between the antenna and the TV, but neither is going to be useless after analog signals cease.
So who is it that’s going to explain to my mother that her 13" TV with rabbit ears in the kitchen’s going to need some sort of external hoo-hah that she’ll have to purchase?
Or will I be like so many other tech-savvy “kids” and hope that the old TV dies before then?
Well, to perpetuate this hijack, is an antenna optimized for today’s analog signals in the TV frequency band going to work as well for digital signals in whatever other band they use?
ATSC digital TV signals use the same frequency bands as NTSC analogue TV signals, just a different channel in that band.
That’s why you see listings like “WSBX-TV channel 5 (WSBX-DT channel 47)”. The station has an analogue transmission on one channel and a digital transmission on another. DT = digital television, presumably.
I think that the FCC eventually wants to cease using some of the existing TV bands for TV and give it over to some other use, but I’m not sure about that.
Existing antennas ought to work as far as frequency goes, but I’m not sure about received power levels.
The original plan was to move all stations to the lower part of the UHF band. That didn’t survive protests by some stations that wanted to stay in the VHF band.
Power levels are set to provide approximately the same coverage as the analog signal.
For most people, a good UHF antenna is their best bet for receiving digital TV.
Are they going to start putting digital receivers into normal, non-HD televisions? So far, digital seems to be synonymous with HD, and I’ll stop watching TV before I spend $1500 on a TV set. Or get a TV tuner card and watch TV on my computer, which will suck but at least be within my means.
They are already doing this. Per the FCC rules, they started with large screen TVs and worked their way down to smaller screen TVs. I’ve seen plenty of non-HD sets with digital tuners in local stores.
I bought an external ATSC tuner that will down-convert everything to SD if connected to an ordinary NTSC TV.
Yes they are going to put digital receivers in ALL TV sets. That is basically the premise of the OP. What will they do with the unsold analog TVs in a few months after the mandate for all new TVs to have digital receivers.
The date for switching off analog stations has been pushed back several times. Is is going to be pushed back again?
Actually, no (or not necessarily). The FCC mandate doesn’t care what cable does since they don’t use the public airwaves. So cable companies can still broadcast NTSC. However, as the number of NTSC TVs drops, they will probably go to all digital as well.
And digital cable uses QAM, not ATSC, so an ATSC tuner won’t help you.
Many ATSC tuners also support QAM. Their usefulness with digital cable may be limited if the cable operator decides to encrypt all of their digital channels, not just the premium channels. In the future, you can expect to see TV sets with support for QAM and CableCARD, which allows the set to receive encrypted digital cable channels.
This sounds like a great opportunity for the cable companies to force everyone onto their digital tiers with the associated programming and converter box rental fees and blaming it on the government anyway. Between freeing up the bandwidth on their wires and the extra income, I would be very surprised if it doesn’t happen.
They are already planning to do this when the digital cable boxes become cheap enough to give away. The value of the recovered bandwidth will more than pay for the cost of the cable boxes. Analog channels are a very inefficient use of system bandwidth.
