An acquaintance recently told me, that he decided to wait till 2009 to buy a new TV set. He mentioned the system was going to be replaced but could not give me any further details. My granddaughter purchased a monster HD TV set a few months ago, so I asked my friend if that would affect her service. He insisted that all TV broadcasts will be “changed” and that there will be no more free-to-air broadcasts. My friend was very insistent that all TV sets will be obsolete as starting next year; everyone will have to have a digital receiver.
This confused me some so I did a bit of research, thinking if the powers-that-be are planning on so radical a change, surely it will be all over the news. I found some [articles](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/technology/personaltech/24basics.html) saying NTSC will be phased out, but I still am not sure what it means. I do not have cable or satellite service, I only watch occasionally but I rely on TV for news and weather.
I will not be affected YET, from what I understand, it will only be implemented in the USA in 2009. Ours is not slated to happen till 2013. However, I find this a little disturbing, considering that millions of people still only watch the free-to-air broadcasts. I also wonder about the numerous local stations, are they all going to be shut down, people lose their jobs? What happens to the local advertisers and the people they employ to make the ads? Annoying they may be, these people still need to make a living.
Does anyone have a link to some articles about this that they can share? If there have been other discussions in this forum, please help me find it. Anyone else bothered by this? Do you support it?
There are free OTA (over-the-air) broadcasts of HDTV signals, from your local network affiliates that carry HD programming (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and PBS in particular). In fact, early adopters of HDTV resorted to using those classic OTA antennas on their roofs. or set-top “rabbit ear” antennas, to pick up the signals back when most cable and satellite companies didn’t yet provide HDTV service. Heck, oftentimes you couldn’t even get your local network channels on satellite.
The decoders / boxes are needed if you want to view these signals on non-HDTV sets. Otherwise, your HDTV has a built in “tuner” that will work for the OTA broadcasts.
Most HDTVs have built-in tuners, as the article goes on to note:
So if you have an HDTV and not a “HD monitor” you should be all set to get OTA HD signals for free, assuming you’re in range of the broadcast tower, don’t get interference, can rotate your antenna directionally depending on the station you’re aiming for, and all that stuff one has to deal with when going with the rabbit ears.
Oh yeah, one more thing: it is true that without use of an analog decoder, once all TV broadcasts are digital (even OTA broadcasts), you may not be able to use your old TV set if it was built prior to the need to conform to the FCC mandate about including ATSC tuners with all TVs that come with NTSC tuners. While the deadline was officially March 1, 2007, most TV manufacturers had already done so a couple of years earlier, so as not to be caught with unsellable inventory in the warehouses.
It remains true, though, that your old Sony Trinitron that you bought back in the 1990s or earlier will need a box to work with OTA signals after the cutoff date (currently Feb 17, 2009). The excellent CNET article I linked to earlier addresses this also:
You specifically will need to purchase a digital tuner for your television, to receive free air broadcasts. You can buy it anytime and use it. You will either have great pictures, or no pictures, with a digital picture. This change over has been talked about and set back year after year. Your friend is handing out misinformation. They can give the set to me, if they really think it won’t work next year.
Any device that has a tuner offering analog reception must include digital now, including computer television cards.
BTW, there are actually MORE channels of free OTA broadcasting now. The bandwidth allocated to each station can be divided up into multiple sub-channels. Many stations are now broadcasting 2 or more independent programs where they used to only broadcast one.
I work for a public television network and what beowulff says is absolutely true. Since we started broadcasting in digital, we have expanded from one channel to four – two traditional broadcast channels, one devoted entirely to Kentucky programming, one to our educational service and one to HD. However, the Kentucky and education channels’ bandwidth is used to create the HD channel, which we only broadcast from 8 pm to midnight. All these channels are available over the air, provided you have either a television with a digital receiver OR you’ve purchased a converter box.
These converter boxes, as have been mentioned above, can be had for free or substanitally reduced price by taking advantage of the government’s coupon program. By merely asking, you can receive a voucher worth $40 toward the purchase of this box.
Television isn’t going away. Nobody’s losing their jobs at local stations.
There’s a hardcore community out there of folks who get HDTV by antenna. To say they are “avid” about it is like saying the Elephant Man was “a little puffy around the eyes”; these guys will go on for hours about mast height, rotators, diplexers, amplifiers, and proper grounding. If you told them that over-the-air television was going the way of the dodo, in the words of Terry Pratchett, you’d get cheesed (which is like getting creamed, but it goes on a lot longer).
Being the gadget geek that I am, I installed an antenna in my attic a few months ago, which hooks into my TV through the Dish Network DVR. The local HD broadcasts do in fact look way nicer than anything that comes from the satellite-based HD channels, so I have to give the OTA fanatics a nod there. And several of the channels do carry multiple feeds; PBS has three, NBC has three (one normal, one strictly weather, and one not live yet), and Fox has two (normal and weather).
Well, if you trust the internet, you can enter your address at AntennaWeb and see who’s broadcasting in your area, how far away the towers are, which direction to orient your antenna, and what kind of antenna you’ll need.
If you live near the northern border, you can watch Canadian over-the-air analogue television for a few years more. I think our switchover date is 2011.
Wisconsin has a zone centered in Marquette county that is not covered properly by broadcast channels. I live on the boarder. It comes down to you might get it or you might not. We go from the weather is good and the television comes in to the picture is fuzz and a voice. It’s not limited to our antenna. Most people want to know if the digital tuner will work at their house before buying one.
I sure would be nice if the video stores that rent dvds and games or the electronics stores, had them available for a cheap test of your reception.
It’s been many, many years since I’ve dealt with OTA signals, and even then, living in NYC means that there’s a bigger problem with eliminating ghosting from interference and the signals reflecting off of many buildings than with not getting a strong enough signal.
For cases where signal strength is an issue, how comparable are the NTSC versus digital broadcast signals? If you currently live in an area of poor NTSC reception, is there any reason to think your digital reception would be any better? Conversely, if you get decent NTSC reception, is there any reason to worry about the digital signal being unusable? Since there’s clearly more information in the digital signal, I’d suppose it would be possible…
The point is pretty much nobody I know wants to buy a tuner to find they can’t use one. The practical test is rent one for $5 and see if it works. The electronics stores will be selling to the holdouts now. Many of whom don’t have $200 to shell out and find they are shit out of luck. A cheap rental might get those people to buy one.
I am just not tech-savvy enough to understand this all at once and I really do appreciate your replies. Thank you for the links you have provided, robardin.
I take it, that when a person has that converter box, they do not need to have a cable or satellite service. All they need is an antenna. Hmmm… I suppose everyone who does not have an attic or access to the rooftop is out of luck. Like big apartment building tenants and people who rent finished basements.
It raises my hackles that one HAS to buy that converter thing. Even with the coupons. There is no guarantee it will work with regular rabbit ears, is there? Millions will need it. Someone stands to make a lot of money here.
People have been doing fine with small indoor antennas. It all depends on the signal strength. Your choice of providers will be what you have always had. Only the air transmission type has changed from analog to digital. Right now there’s an overlap that will end in a year.
No guarantee, but then there is no guarantee that rabbit ears alone will suffice for picking up current analog (NTSC) TV signals either – it depends on the distance, direction and strength of the signal you’re trying to pick up, and the tolerances built in to your equipment (antenna and TV).
Except for the inevitable but hopefully rare exceptions, if you are using rabbit ears now to get TV reception for a given channel, you should still be able to use the rabbit ears to get reception after putting a converter box in between the rabbit ears and your TV set. It’s supposed to be as simple as that (well, as simple as that, plus getting one of those Congressional coupons, plus finding a place that sells the converter box and takes the coupon).
As for this “forced conversion” raising your hackles, it’s the only way to move to a new standard. It’s like what happened in the European countries that moved to adopt the Euro as their currency. There was a period where they had a fixed exchange rate between French Francs, Deutsche Marks, etc., to the Euro, and everybody could still spend their FF/DEM/etc. bills, but were supposed to exchange them at banks for the new Euro notes and coins. After a certain cutoff point, the old bills were no longer legal tender, and not even banks would accept them for exchange.
Sure it sucked for some people when they found they had stashes of the old notes in drawers, mattresses, change jars and whatnot after the cutoff point, just like it will suck for OTA TV viewers who never got around to adding the converter box and will have their TV black out all of a sudden until they do. But without a hard cutoff date, the old standard would just linger on forever, adding the cost of supporting it to the entire infrastructure.
Do not confuse digital with HD. They are separate sides of the same thing.
You don’t need to buy a new TV to see digital broadcasts, but you do need a digital tuner, which comes in the form of set-top boxes. New TVs are also equipped with digital tuners. New TVs are also overwhelmingly HDTVs.
You will need some way to receive digital signals. You do not necessarily need a new TV or anything HD capable, though it’s not a bad idea to prepare for the future.