Americans are too dumb to watch television
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.
proee
January 28, 2009 @ 2:43 pm
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…
David Wihl
January 28, 2009 @ 5:30 pm
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.
Larry
January 29, 2009 @ 8:15 am
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.