Menu
  • Home
  • Podcast
      • Slice of SciFi 878: St. AgathaDarren Lynn Bousman on Directing “St. Agatha”
      • Slice of SciFi 877: She Makes Comics“She Makes Comics” Director Marisa Stotter
      • Slice of SciFi 876: Exploring Battlestar GalacticaExploring Battlestar Galactica: 40 Perspectives for 40 Years
      • Slice of SciFi 875: Star Trek Epic EpisodesNick Jones on “Star Trek: Epic Episodes”
    • View all
  • TV Reviews
      • "Project Blue Book"“Project Blue Book” explores the threads of UFO reports
      • Manifest Season 1: 5 Episodes In5 Episodes In: “Manifest”
      • 5 Episodes In: Reverie5 Episodes In: “Reverie”
      • 5 Episodes In: Marvel's Cloak and Dagger5 Episodes In: “Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger”
    • View all
  • Movie Reviews
      • Review: Alita: Battle Angel (2019)“Alita: Battle Angel” is an entertaining but incomplete story
      • Happy Death Day 2U (2019)“Happy Death Day 2U” continues the loop, more fun with a twist
      • Cold Pursuit (2019)“Cold Pursuit” is an engaging but uneven look at revenge run off the rails
      • The Kid Who Would Be King (2019)“The Kid Who Would Be King”: A fun, modern take on the King Arthur legend
    • View all
  • DVD Reviews
  • Columns
  • News
      • TV News
      • Film News
      • DVD News
      • Interviews
      • Events
      • Geeky, Funny & Weird
      • Online Entertainment News
      • Music News
      • On Stage
      • Space News

Slice of SciFi

This is How We Geek Out: Interviews, Reviews & More

  • Writers, After Dark
  • Horror Happenings
  • Old School Blerds
  • Slice of SciFi TV
  • Contact Slice of SciFi
  • About Us

Analog TV Death Sentence Delayed

September 14, 2007 By S. K. Sloan 8 Comments

In a follow-up to our previous story about the demise of Analog TV in 2009, the FCC has extended it until the year 2012, giving the old-school method three more years of life.

This decision will require both network and cable broadcasters to continue providing an analog feed to their customers even though all of them have spent literally multi-millions of dollars gearing up and getting ready for the new digital age of television viewing. This decision to postpone the inevitable could end up costing more in the long run as providers will now have to decide to either give away free digital to analog converters or risk the anger of their customers by charging more for them and possibly loosing them. Either way, the FCC’s decision to hold off for another three years doesn’t sound like it was very well thought out from a business model point of view. But, this is a government agency, so when has sound business practice ever been a concern to an organization that freely feeds at the public trough?

So, I am led to wonder, if in three years, will the FCC pull another dead rabbit out of its proverbial as… er, hat and in 2012, postpone the move to full digital once again? Time will tell!

TwitterFacebookEmail

Filed Under: Columns

About S. K. Sloan

Samuel K. Sloan's love of Star Trek brought him to Slice of SciFi, where he was Managing Editor from 2005-2011, and returned from 2013-2014 before retiring once again from scifi news gathering.

Comments

  1. English Police says

    September 14, 2007 at 2:57 am

    “..spent literally multi-millions of dollars gearing up and getting ready for the new digital age of television viewing.”

    What and awfully fractured sentence that is.

    “literally multi-millions”? Seriously if you can’t nail down a figure like “hundreds of millions” just stick with “millions”, also we can presume they haven’t spent the money figuratively so the word “literally” just makes the sentence even more clunky to read. One more snipe.. “gearing up” and “getting ready for” mean the same thing, doubling up doesn’t add weight to the sentence, it just makes it look like the writer is trying too hard.

  2. Sam says

    September 14, 2007 at 3:40 am

    It’s an editorial rant, not a thesis on the proper use of the English language. I’ll save that for “English Police.”

  3. tom says

    September 14, 2007 at 4:06 am

    This is not the first, and most likely not the last pushback of this date. The original date was a few years back.

    As long as the cable and tv manufacturers can afford the government officials, Analog is here.

    The people who want to reuse the frequency spectrum will have to pony up bigger bribes

  4. EddieLa says

    September 14, 2007 at 7:19 am

    They should abandon the inadequate MPEG2 compression standard that digital hi-def broadcasts use now and upgrade to the more efficient and advanced MPEG4/AVC standard that the UK has adopted. The rush to digital TV has left us not only with this analog TV delay, but also with degraded image quality. Just watch “Battlestar Galactica” on Universal’s HD channel for a prime example. MPEG2 compression cannot cope with all the shaky camera work and fast-moving action scenes in that show. This is wishful thinking though. It’s already too late.

  5. Chris says

    September 14, 2007 at 2:34 pm

    BS. How many pushbacks is this now? Why even bother keep setting deadlines if they are meaningless?

  6. We_are_Borg says

    September 14, 2007 at 3:35 pm

    What’s even funnier is that this last spring, the FCC and FTC went around to thousands of electronics retailers and issued fines of up to $50,000 per location for not haveing a little card displayed next to each and every device that only received analog (NTSC)television broadcasts but not digital (ATSC). They got as picky as issuing fines for not having them on small AM/FM/TV-audio pocket radios!

    Now I suppose they’ll be back to see if the cards have the newly corrected date and fine everybody else…

  7. Scott from Kalamazoo says

    September 15, 2007 at 5:26 pm

    Sam,

    This has had much discussion on the home theater boards. This does *NOT* change the analog TV shutdown in 2009. What it does is that it requires cable companies to either continue offering analog signals of the networks on it’s cable systems or offer said people a digital cable box if the cable system goes all digital (which they all are to save bandwidth). It just means that cable can’t come along in 2009 and shut down the analog tier and claim “they made us do it”. They must downconvert to analog or provide a digital box.

    That’s all this ruling means.

  8. David says

    October 18, 2007 at 1:52 pm

    Check out http://www.fcc.gov for the latest. It still says: “DTV Transition Deadline is February 17, 2009”

    Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet… 🙂

Trackbacks

  1. Flametoad » Blog Archive » Lord, Please Save Us From Good Intentions says:
    September 17, 2007 at 12:06 pm

    […] other news, the FCC has once again pushed back the date in which all US broadcasters were supposed to drop analog signals in favor of digital ones. If […]

Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Search in posts
Search in pages
Filter by Categories
Audio Productions
Awards News
Book News
Book Reviews
Columns
Comics News
DVD News
DVD Reviews
Entertainment Business News
Events
Fan Films
Fan Productions
Film News
Film Reviews
Gaming News
Geeky, Funny & Weird
Human Interest
Interviews
Music News
On Stage
Online Entertainment News
Science News
Slice of SciFi
Slice Video News
Space News
Specials
Technology News
TV News
TV Reviews

Listen to Slice of SciFi

iTunes
Google Play Podcasts
Stitcher
Player.FM
Tune In
RSS
 

Keep Up With Slice of SciFi

  • Movie & TV Reviews

Recent Comments

  • Mj on “The Predator” misses on all points that matter in a movie: “It was the worst movie of 2018. Runner up being mortal engines.”
  • Summer Brooks on Tonight’s Sky: February 2019 Video Guide: “I miss the narrator, too, and also the details about the planets and other events, like the eclipse... so far…”
  • Jim on Tonight’s Sky: February 2019 Video Guide: “I enjoy these videos, but I wish they had kept the narrator. They now feel like something is missing.”
  • Gary Carlson on “Project Blue Book”: David O’Leary on searching for UFOs: “Why was the government afraid to reveal the truth about UFOs in the PROJECT BLUE BOOK? https://www.amazon.com/dp/1513645854”
  • Chris on Aquaman vs Namor: “Namor was beaten by Aquaman in a truly ludicrous battle in the DC vs. Marvel series.…”
Tweets by @sliceofscifi
It's Okay, Pluto

Slice of SciFi
1121 Annapolis Rd PMB 238
Odenton MD 21113
602-635-6976

Artwork:
Slice of SciFi spiral logo courtesy of Tim Callender

Theme Music:
Slice of SciFi music and themes
courtesy of Sci-Fried

Sister Sites:
Writers, After Dark
Horror Happenings
Old School Blerds
Slice of SciFi TV

Copyright © 2005–2019 · Magazine Pro Theme On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in