Imagine a Monty Python movie where some angry Frenchmen were looking for a way to taunt Americans and said “Americans are too dumb to figure out how to watch television.” We don’t need to wait for Monty Python to reunite because we have Barack Obama and the U.S. Senate saying the same thing (nytimes story).
I have symphathy for folks too dumb to watch over-the-air HDTV because I’m one of them. Back in 2003, I bought an accessory ATSC tuner (“conversion box”) as a conversation piece. It cost about $300 back then and no government coupons were available to help pay for them. I went through the checkout line at BestBuy with a friend born in the 1970s. She said “What are you going to do with that?” I replied that I intended to watch the new HDTV broadcasts. “You don’t have cable,” she responded. “How are you going to get the signal?” I explained that the Feds had just required local TV stations to start broadcasting in HDTV. “Where will the information come from?” From the ether, I explained. Electromagnetic waves in the ether. Like the ones that go to the car radio. “TV comes from the wall. Or from satellite,” she responded. “TV stations don’t transmit like radio stations.” Don’t you remember rabbit ears? Blank stare.
Once home, I discovered that some of the stations were too weak to receive with an indoor antenna, though I lived smack in the middle of an urban area in a wood-framed house. Changing channels was not instant, as with analog TV, but took several seconds to jump from station to station, thus putting an end to any pleasure from channel surfing. Each station was broken up into multiple substations. Channel 2 could be received as “2-1, 2-2, 2-10” and sometimes more variations. Channel 2-2 would show something totally different from 2-1. How would you know what was on 2-2 or 2-10? There was no published TV guide that I could find that said (no longer true today; tvguide.com lists this info (though you could also argue that anyone with Internet access doesn’t need TV because all of the important TV content is available as streaming video)). Without a program listing, the only way to figure out what was on was by channel surfing, which, as noted previously, took forever because the tuner needed to do a lot of computation before latching onto a digital stream. Sometimes a subchannel would show video from one source while playing audio from an unrelated show.
I gave up on TV and went back to the PC.
Well sounds like your converter box is using some ancient technology. I bought my first converter box last month for $50 using one of those government coupon cards (ended up choosing the insignia model).
Flipping between channels is done instantly and the menu guide works most of the time (pretty slick). The picture and sounds are incredible.
My folks had an early converter box (about 3 years old) and it suffers from the same problems you describe…
Cheers…
Had you persisted, using AntennaWeb’s antenna pointer, you’d actually get a noticeably better signal over the air than through cable, even fibre such as FiOS. Via broadcast, they can transmit 20 mpbs, whereas through wired connections, there is not enough bandwidth so the carriers dial down the HD resolution. Realize that before spending extra bucks on 1080 vs 720.
WCVB transmits a high resolution real time radar on 5.1 (IIRC), which can useful sometimes. I leave the HD rabbit ears around in case of a major emergency and Verizon might be down. Watching TV on the PC can be more frustrating than wiring up old lamp cord for an antenna as many found out during the inauguration.
Overall, your point is correct – it’s a real pain to have an antenna instead of a wired connection. So maybe the reallocation of bandwidth will yield some useful results after all by something other than TV.
Given the number of new HD sets I have seen stretching the 4×3 image to 16×9 at friends’ houses, the health club, stores, etc I agree we are too dumb to watch TV. Either that or the manufacturers were to dumb to put in some sort of system to detect aspect ratio. Given this obvious omission I guess I’m not to surprised the digital channel switch is baffling to consumers and broadcasters.
Bothering to comment to a post made a year and a half ago, I assume it hasn’t changed much since them. There are certainly a good number of people out there who hardly remember a day when watching TV meant tuning to a specific channel that was broadcast through the airwaves (and for FREE). I hate this mentality that TV is wired and not free as it seems nowadays, but then, hardly anything on FREE TV doesn’t seem to be of interest to me at all (what with the way programming is nowadays). Having an outdoor tower like the days when a trusty Channel Master set-up gave you results has passed rather sadly, replaced with whatever newbie scam is there for the taking. It also doesn’t help how some of these channels don’t always come in that well at all nowadays, the fancy days of analog snow (which could still be viewable depending on reception) is replaced by digital artifacting blocks and other hiccups that is a far cry in terms of how limited the viewing capabilities are. The fact they’re even bothering to make portable ATSC TV sets can be a joke since you can’t really get anything with just the antennas provided on them, you still need to fiddle around with some regular rabbit ear set-up wherever you go, let alone keep it immobile as movement apparently is not the norm in our digital world (reasons for why people don’t go outside much I guess).
Oh well, I try to be optimistic, but it’s hard to be that way when you know trying to DX signals out of your own city isn’t really worth it much anymore if there isn’t something new or different to what you would see locally, and that was the fun I had 25 years ago when I would see cartoons or some other program I couldn’t see locally. Local TV is practically bland and all the same nowadays, the only thing that probably saves it a little are these subchannels and the type of networks they’re creating to fill up those slots