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!
“..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.
It’s an editorial rant, not a thesis on the proper use of the English language. I’ll save that for “English Police.”
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
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.
BS. How many pushbacks is this now? Why even bother keep setting deadlines if they are meaningless?
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…
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.
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… 🙂