Following on from this thread:
Here in the UK, we are in the middle of switching from analogue to digital TV. We have to either buy a new digital TV or a digital set top box. When the switch over is complete, the analogue signals will be switched off.
What is the situation in your country?
February 17 will be the end of all analog TV signals in the US. We have been getting the PSA’s for almost a year now.
Same thing here, by 2010 IIRC. Highly likely to get pushed back though.
ETA: In South Africa that is.
Some low powered stations will remain broadcasting analog, but they’ll reach almost nobody, and be stuff like local religious broadcasters. February is the end of analog broadcast as far as most people are concerned.
Here’s a worldwide list. Go Luxembourg!
I bet those aliens watching the old shows on another planet are going to be pissed at having to build a converter box with having just figured out what that analog signal was and built an analog set.:mad: Their message to us won’t work when it arrives either.:smack:
And to top it off, the government program to help pay for digital converter boxes has run out of money.
They keep shifting the date here because staggeringly few people are interested in buying a $50-$100 Digital Set Top Box that will enable them to… watch the same TV they can watch now.
It’s supposed to be 2012ish last I heard; they basically have to wait until enough people start to replace their old, worn out CRT TVs with LCD TVs that have inbuilt Digital Tuners in them.
The switch-over will happen eventually, though. The Government needs the money from flogging off the newly-available bandwidth that the abandonment of the analogue frequencies will free up.
Not so much. A good number of smaller and/or rural communities receive television broadcasts via translator.
[Lrrr]Give us the McNeal![/Lrrr]
That still doesn’t conflict with what I said and I meant all remaining sources in the United States. Most people will not receive analog broadcasts any longer.
That’s a very poor showing. In the UK at least you get a lot more free to air digital channels than you get free to air analogue channels (whether they’re worth watching or not is another matter entirely, of course). Plus you can buy crappy budget set-top boxes for about a tenner here (which is about 20AUD I believe).
On the plus side you have better weather (so don’t really need to be stuck inside watching the telly).
OB
There are a couple of extra channels, but they’re of the “News in Latvian or Different Views of the Same Show” variety, with the exception of ABC 2, which is still largely timeshifts or repeats of stuff from ABC 1.
In short, nothing worth spending $50 on for most people.
Moved from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
The PSAs are quite frequent and very simple to understand, but polls show that many are still confused about the transition, and about 10% of television viewers aren’t even aware analog will be switched off in about a month. How they’re ignorant of that, I don’t know; the PSAs have been commonplace for the past year and a half, and non-stop for the past six months.
The PSAs generally piss me off. I don’t have cable anymore (I did for about 4 months this past year, but then I realized that all told I probably watched maybe 12 hours worth of programming in that time) but it got to me that those PSAs would be on constantly even on channels that were cable only. Cable users do not need any sort of converter box. And from someone I know who got one, he says its tough to adjust to get the stations you’d want. Great picture, yes, but that’s only when you can get it.
I’ve heard complaints that for this area, so close to the border, people won’t be able to see the Canadian stations they want to watch. The response to it was that newer converter boxes have an analog bypass option.
Whole thing looks like a dumb mess to me anyway. Not all that many people still have the rabbit ears. Yes, I know a few will pop in here and say “I do!” but as a norm… is there some data out there that says what percentage of TV viewers use regular antenna?
I’d like to know what the percentage of antenna-only users there are as well.
But regards to the above quote, it’s hard to tell until 2/17, because many stations, while having been broadcasting digital since 2005, don’t have their signal fully powered up. Once they switch off the analog, many areas should be seeing a boost to their digital reception area.
Well, we’re still using a rabbit-ears antenna and I’m pissed off about this whole thing. We got our voucher for a converter box, which didn’t even cover the full cost of the box, and brought the thing home only to find that it won’t pick up a couple of stations. At all. I mean, no signal at all, not even a choppy one. I contacted the stations in question and they both sort of shrugged and said that buildings and other obstacles can impair the digital signal. This doesn’t really make sense to me, as both channels come in perfectly clearly, with no ghosting or static, via our current analog signal.
So what this means for us is that we’re going to contact the damn cable company to ask if there’s some kind of low-cost broadcast-station-only package we can buy. I’m not interested in getting cable. I don’t want cable. I am perfectly happy with just the stations we get over the air, except that’s not an option anymore. This is very annoying to me.
MsWhatsit, I think the key is to concentrate on getting UHF signals. I just switched over and here’s how I’ve got my new TV rigged up. I’m not using the old rabbit ears to pick up the digital broadcasts. I had an old bowtie-style clip-on UHF antenna with a piece of twin-lead. I hooked the twin-lead connector to a couple of adapters to mate it to a piece of coax that is attached to the TV (in your case, you’d attach it to the converter box). I have a push-pin holding the bowtie antenna up near the ceiling. I’m about 40-50 miles out from the transmitters in a wooded hilly area and I’m getting all the digital stations in St. Louis with my juryrigged setup, including full-HD on the stations that are transmitting it.
The main thing in my setup is the old inside UHF TV antenna. All the other rigamarole is just the junk that gets the antenna connected to the TV.
