[mythtv-users] Obama Recommends Delay in Digital TV Switch

[jedi]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 07:28:12AM -0700, Brian Wood wrote:
> David Brodbeck wrote:
> > Doug Lytle wrote:
> >> Interesting:
> >>
> >> http://tvdecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/obama-recommends-delay-in-digital-tv-switch/?hp
> >>   
> > 
> > Consumer's Union is supporting this, too.
> > 
> > I have mixed feelings.  I'm not that keen on the digital switch to begin 
> > with -- I don't think the consumer benefits are worth the cost, and I 
> > don't like the way it introduces DRM capabilities into the official TV 
> > standards.  But it's already been delayed for two years, and it seems 
> > like delaying further might provoke lawsuits from the entities that the 
> > government has sold the analog spectrum to.
> > 
> > I actually think the worst-publicized (and worst-thought-out) part of 
> > the whole transition is the channel reshuffling that's supposed to 
> > happen in February.
> 
> It was pushed as enhancing "Public Safety", because a tiny sliver of
> spectrum space was to be allocated for police and fire radios etc. This
> was a total scam, the real reason was to make money auctioning the
> spectrum space.
> 
> It's perhaps too late to delay, the profits of too many corporations are
> tied up with it, as well as the money the government expects to get.
> 
> People were not complaining about NTSC quality, heck most people were
> happy with VHS quality.
> 
> I agree that including DRM was not consumer-friendly, but if we give
> them more time to play with things that will probably get even worse.

    It's really not in anyone's interests (including consumers) to make
this transition any easier on anyone than it already is. It needs to be
ugly and painful in order to get normally apathetic people to sit up and
take notice of things.

    ...and people were complaining about NTSC quality. That's why a lot
of people have cable of some sort. They can't get decent signal otherwise.
Although HD isn't what's needed. A good clean signal from a good source is
what's needed.

     I find it amazing that even with digital that SD content is still
noticably inferior to what you might create yourself from a DVD after 
you've run it through aggressive compression.