[mythtv-users] DTV: It Has Begun

[Michael T. Dean]

On 09/08/2008 04:34 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> While everyone knows that The Big Ol' Analog Switch will be getting
> pulled next spring, and OTA NTSC-M will be no more (except for low power
> stations and translators; pity them), I'd bet most of you didn't know
> that Wilmington NC pulled said switch *today at Noon ET*:
>
> 	http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/3502478/
>   

Heh...  "The transition is being compared to the change from 
black-and-white television to color TV in the 1950s."

The funny thing being that the color TV standard was chosen explicitly 
to make the signal backwards-compatible with existing tuners/decoders in 
B&W TV's while maintaining the broadcast channel bandwidth already in 
use.  In other words, how exactly is the digital TV transition similar 
to the B&W to color transition?

And, don't even get me started on the number of stations broacasting 
digital high-def material with a "DTV Transition 2009" graphic  on the 
left with a scroller that says something to the effect of, "If you are 
receiving this program through a cable or satellite TV receiver, there 
is nothing you need to do.  However, if you are receiving the program 
through an antenna, there are additional steps you must perform before 
the transition to continue to receive this high-quality programming."  
The graphic and scroller are obviously rendered on an HDTV picture, and 
cutting the widescreen picture to 4:3 would leave some portion of the 
"DTV Transition 2009" graphic, while cutting off the rest, so they're 
obviously encoding it differently into a non-HDTV .  So, why in the 
world are they telling me that I need to get cable or satellite TV (the 
message I would expect most sheep to take from their simplistic, "cable 
and satellite work, but /you/ have to do more work if you use an 
antenna," statement) when I'm happily watching the digital transmission 
received from my antenna.

Mike