Similar problem where I work: I work in a nursing home that steadfastly refuses to provide the residents with cable TV, and most of our residents don’t have the money to go buy new TVs, so we applied for converter box coupons for them. I’ve rigged up a couple, and basically our residents have gone from getting one station well and four poorly, to getting one station well, and nothing else at all.
Is this situation likely to change after the 2/17 switchover?
You mean some of the converter boxes don’t output analog stations? :eek:
I wasn’t aware of this. Right now, I have a Philips DVDR3576H DVD recorder with a 160 GB hard drive, and a JVC DR-MV100B DVD and VCR recorder combo. The units have both a digital and an analog tuner, so you can get both. The tuners in both of these are stronger than the digital tuner in my Toshiba 47HL167 LCD TV. In other words, the TV will say “low broadcast signal” and just be a blue screen, while the DVD recorders will pick up the station (using the same antenna).
So yeah, I can’t recommend using a DVD recorder with a digital tuner for free, over-the-air TV enough. It costs more money-up-front than a converter box, but it’s only a one-time cost. The downside is that all DVD recorders (as opposed to the expensive, $180 high-definition terrestrial tuners) currently downconvert the digital stations that are in HD to standard definition.
That is correct, including the two that I bought using my $40 vouchers.
Since the only low power stations I could ever get are either religious or home shopping, this doesn’t distress me, but I’m sure there are people who rely on translators or enjoy that type of programming.
And it’s been mostly a scam, anyway.
People were encouraged to apply for these coupons early, then found out that there were hardly any of the converter boxes available to buy in electronics stores. And then the coupons had a short expiration date, and have expired. And you can’t get a new coupon if your old ones expired. (Why they ever had an expiration date in the first place has never been explained.) And then the limit of 2 coupons per address, even though most houses have more than 2 TVs.
The last figures I saw, only 43% of these coupons have actually been used. So well over half of them were not used. Hell, even mail-in rebate coupons pay off better than this FCC scam!
We just upgraded to an HDTV, so we didn’t need a converter box, but we had to get a digital antenna. There’s zero reception in this apartment building without it. We’ve already made the switch, though, so that’s good.
My parents have it rougher. They have a TV in every room because my dad is obsessed with TV. But he also can’t let go of old electronics, so all but three are CRT televisions. They got their two coupons, used them, and then used mine to get another box, and still don’t have enough converter boxes for every TV in the house. My mom is trying to convince my dad to part with some televisions, since they have them in rooms that are empty 99% of the time.
I’m a little pissed at our local CBS outfit, KFVS. They are broadcasting a DTV signal, but refuse to recognize complaints that it’s a really crappy output, even though a lot of people I know are having problems. Even my parents, who pick up more stations than I do and live close to one of their towers, can’t get it. I hope they intend to boost the signal strength when they switch in February. It’s the only CBS carrier that can be picked up in this part of Southern Illinois.
So far, the best DTV channels I’ve seen in our area are all WSIU, which is PBS. Their HD channel is gorgeous and rarely ever craps out. Even the regular SD channel is fantastic.
The switchover is complete here in southeast Norway, with no analogue signals available; in some areas both digital and analogue signals are still being broadcast, but the analogue broadcasts will be switched off throughout the country by the end of the year. We have cable so the change didn’t affect us at all, but I know there were complaints that those who still use a traditional antenna (as opposed to cable, satellite, and broadband subscribers) were disproportionately elderly viewers, and that it was difficult to figure out what was information about the switchover and what was advertising for new products connected with it.
As I discovered when I finally ordered my coupons yesterday. The site said I’d go on a waiting list!
I’ve got cable, but only for the main TV. Haven’t paid Comcast for a line into the kitchen. No great problem for now.
However, I’m thinking ahead to hurricane season. Like everybody else in Houston, I lost power when Ike blew in. Mine was restored by 6PM of the very next day. My cable was out for almost a week, but at least I had broadcast TV.
You don’t need a special antenna to get digital TV though- the one on the roof of your house should work just fine. The difference is that instead of having an analogue tuner in your TV, you’ve got a Digital Tuner there. Or the antenna lead runs from your wall into the Digital Set Top Box and from there into your telly.
The bigger issue I noticed here when I was working in the electronics retail industry was people with really old TVs that either didn’t have RCA sockets in them, or only had one set (being used by the DVD player or the PlayStation) and had to run their Digital STBs via an RF lead. It was just one step too complicated for most people.
According to this government site, digital broadcasts in Japan started back around 2003, and analog broadcasts will end on July 24, 2011.
Our family room TV is digital, but my MIL has an ancient TV in her bedroom that won’t be usable after 2011 (if it even survives that long). I may get her a lightweight LCD TV for her birthday this year.
I don’t know what to think about the digital conversion. It seems it’s going to screw over the poorest, most isolated people who use over-the-air television the most.
We’ve always used rabbit ears, and once we got digital converter boxes, we received about 30 crystal-clear channels/subchannels, so it was a big improvement for us. This was in an urban area, on top of a hill.
Then we recently moved less than 20 miles to a suburb, into a very low-lying house, and we get nothing but two little nearby fringe-programming stations. Now we have to pony up almost $30 a month if we want to watch ONLY the (formerly) free, over-the-air local stations. It irks my tightwad soul.
About the digital converter boxes—the first Zenith digital converter box we got didn’t get analog signals, but we bought another this summer, and the current generation does get analog signals.
It’d probably be cheaper to just buy another, updated box with analog bypass, but here’s what I would do:
If your TV only has an RF/antenna input and no A/V inputs, you’d have to use an RF modulator to rejoin the two (one analog, one digital streams).
Drat, passed the window for editing. I was gonna say, if you have a VCR with an A/V input, you could use that as the RF modulator.
You do realize that, unlike mail-in rebates, you’re not paying anything to be reimbursed? This “scam” is merely a badly planned government program to fund the conversion for people so they don’t have to pay for it all themselves. The government doesn’t make the things and has to coordinate to make sure there’s enough out there for everybody. If this gets messed up… I just don’t care. There’s bigger things to worry about.
I say screw it, I don’t care if the old ladies get to watch Judge Judy come February. Let people pay for it themselves and spend the money on inner city schools.
Funny, I thought it was my tax money funding this.
I can agree with this. Besides schools, we have lots of infrastructure that needs repair, like the bridge over the Mississippi River about 2 miles north of me that fell down last year.
Obama team urges delay in digital TV transition: “President-elect Barack Obama is urging Congress to postpone the Feb. 17 switch from analog to digital television broadcasting, arguing that too many Americans who rely on analog TV sets to pick up over-the-air channels won’t be ready.”
I think they should kill the analog programing for a day, so the idiots that haven’t figured it out yet get the message. All stations should broadcast you really are stupid aren’t you? We will broadcast starting tomorrow for one more week and if your still can’t figure out you need a new converter, we’re sure you’ll enjoy watching a blank screen.
Here’s what I want to know…
The reason the switchover is mandatory is so they can free up bandwidth for emergency communications et al.
And digital is “so much better.”
Then why don’t they use the better band for emergency communications, where you WANT the best quality possible??
It’s the same band. Going to digital allows the TV signals to take up a much smaller portion of it.
Whether or not the digital TV broadcast is better is a separate issue, often depending on the TV station’s broadcast equipment, and the layout of the locality.
Bullshit. That’s the excuse.
The real reason is so that broadcast media can make more money, by having more bandwidth available to send more TV signals, so they can compete with cable TV & satellite providers.
You can be sure that most of this freed-up bandwidth is auctioned off to broadcast media corporations, rather than used for “emergency communications”.
Well, this could be viewed as “paying money to the Government to offer more TV to everyone.” I understand the problem that the switchover poses for some people, but it’s not as if there’s no upside at all.