2009: The end of TV broadcasting as we know it

In February of next year, all TV stations are supposed to make the switch over to digital broadcasting, making analog equipment obsolete. We are being inundated presently with advertising, advising people with analog TV's who still get their programs through the airwaves instead of cable, to get adapter equipment to upgrade their TV's to receive digital broadcasts.

That would be fine... if it worked. But will it work just as good as the analog broadcasts it's replacing? If the following article is any indication, I would say "no". From Doc Searls at Linux Journal:

What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February?

[...] On February 17, 2009, all U.S. television stations will be required to switch off their analog transmitters and use digital transmission exclusively. Nearly all of that will happen on what's left of the UHF band. Most stations will maintain their old channel branding, and still be known as "Channel 2" or "Channel 12", but their signals will in nearly all cases be coming in on a new UHF channel.

[...]

If you have an HDTV and live within sight of New York TV station transmitters on the Empire State Building, you can probably pick them up over an antenna on your set or your roof. In fact, a loop or bowtie antenna will do. So will length of wire about 5 inches long, attached to the center conductor of your coaxial connection on the back of your set.

But if you live farther away, good luck. Your old VHF TV station not only won't have the range it did on VHF, but will probably not have the same range as an old analog signal on the same UHF frequency. It certainly won't have the same behavior. The signals tend to be either there or not-there. They don't degrade gracefully with increasing "snow", as analog signals did. They break up into a plaid-like pattern, or disappear entirely.

[...]

Digital signal transmission is also very different from the analog sort. For a variety of arcane technical reasons, many (perhaps most) digital signals are directional. That is, they operate at their full licensed power in only a few (or perhaps only one) direction, and have big dents or "nulls" in other directions. In the old analog days directionality was the exception rather than the rule, and was usually intentional, to protect other signals on the same or adjacent frequencies, or to pull back on the signal in the direction of a mountain that might cause unwanted reflections or places (such as the sea) where nobody lived anyway. Not the case with DTV. Lots of new DTV signals are directional just anyway.

It's interesting to see how this plays out where we live in Santa Barbara (and where I'm writing this now).

On my old roof antenna and its rotator, I got just about every analog TV station between Santa Barbara and San Diego. That included both VHF and UHF signals. With that antenna (the top one from Radio Shack) I even got little K35DG, a low-power UHF station at UC San Diego with a signal that puts a deep null in our direction (west-northwest, nearly 200 miles across the Pacific ocean). I sent them emails reporting reception and they were amazed.

In our new house (next door to the old one that had the big roof antenna) I anticipated the digital switchover and installed a high-gain Winegard HD-9022 UHF antenna. For analog reception it gets every UHF in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego/Tijuana — in nearly all weather, at nearly all times of year. But that's analog. What about digital?

For DTV, the Winegard does the best it can, but it's not enough. The slight terrain shadowing between here and Broadcast Peak (where most our local TV stations radiate from) makes the two digital signals from there — KPMR and KEYT — almost impossible to receive. I haven't seen KPMR at all (could be it's not on the air yet), and KEYT's signal on Channel 27 is barely there. In fact it's so bad that the one time I got it the signal didn't stay visible long enough for me to shoot a picture of it. That's a far cry from KEYT's signal on Channel 3, which was crystalline on our old roof antenna and is still okay with rabbit ears on our old Trinitron in the basement.

Ironically, the only clear DTV pictures we get are mostly from 200 or more miles away across the ocean — from San Diego/Tijuana. All our HD viewing of over-the-air TV is from there. As you see here and here, reception is either perfect or gone. In fact it's most of the time. Setting up the DVR ro record programs is pointless, give the low hit/miss ratio of reception.

My points:

1. For many viewers, the digital signals aren't going to be there, no matter what the viewer does (other than hunt them down on cable or satellite).
2. The stations themselves in most cases are giving up viewers, including (as in WECT's case -- see below) whole regional markets.

It's all a big new game of hard-to-get.

Of course, what you get from the FCC and the TV industry is pure propaganda. If you watch TV at all you have surely seen many reassuring messages about what's going to happen in February. If all you watch are cable or satellite, you won't notice the difference. But if you watch over the air signals, the difference will possibly be huge, regardless of what the promotional messages say. So will the disconnect between the whole concept of television and its origins as a live terrestrial medium. Hey, what's the "range" of a YouTube video? Or of anything you send over the Net, including live video streams? [...]

It's the end of TV as we've known it. I suspect that so many people now get their TV from cable or satellite, that the people who complain about the new digital broadcasts limited reception will simply be ignored, and told to get cable if they want better reception.

Meanwhile, the FCC has auctioned off many of the former analog TV bands for about 20 BILLION dollars, to new owners like AT&T, and Verizon:

FCC releases 700MHz auction details, Verizon, AT&T big winners

Some people are predicting that the next "Big Thing" will be TV content being sent to cell phones. We shall see.

I can't personally say I will miss analog TV broadcasting, because I haven't used it for decades. In the city, so many things interfered with reception, we went with cable. Here in rural Oregon, we have only one TV station within analog broadcast range, and it comes in so badly that we don't watch it. We get DISH satellite TV. The programing you pay for also tends to be better than the crap the networks offer for free.

I'll miss the concept of analog TV the way it was, but I won't miss it in practical reality. The change-over may suck for those who still depend on the airwave broadcasts, but Doc Searls believes that all things considered, the change is ultimately a positive development in the evolution of TV:

[...] This essay, and a shorter one in an upcoming Linux Journal, are swan songs for my expiring expertise (such as it is, or was) in analog broadcast engineering. Knowing this kind of stuff will be as useful to me as the Morse code I haven't used in close to 50 years. And I'm looking forward to it.

Because the failures of the DTV switchover will bring into sharp relief the obsolescence of official notions about What TV Is.

What we called TV has already become nothing more than a form of data that can be carried over the Net at nearly zero cost, and stored anywhere for about the same. Live transmission is a demanding thing, but not once the pipes get fat enough. Where they aren't, we have podcasting and variations in file size to avoid bandwidth hoggery.

Already anybody can produce high-def TV. As devices such as the Red camera come down in price, along with processing, data storage and render farming, Hollywood-grade video production quality will no longer be exclusive to Hollywood. Collaboration and distribution over the Net will inevitably follow.

As it does, it will become ever more clear that "TV stations" will be repositioned as doomed mainframes.

There will always be a need for local and regional news, and coverage of events by organizations and individuals whose interest and expertise is also local and regional. But "range" will be determined by interest, not by transmission medium. [...]

Read the rest to see what he has to say about the brave new future of TV. The whole article is worth reading, it has many more details (and references and examples) than I've excerpted here, and lots of embedded links, too. It's a thorough examination of the topic, and you won't have to be a geek to understand it.
     

Electronics, Multimedia, Reality and Children.

As the One Laptop Per Child project moves forward, kids seem to take to the computers quickly and with enthusiasm. Even very young kids. How about a 6 year old? From the blog Suburban (in)Sanity:

This laptop is so simple even a six-year-old can show you

My six-year-old son, Liam, and I recently attended a One Laptop Per Child networking event at the Marie Murphy school in Wilmette, IL. The event was put on by Chris Brown as part of a teacher professional development day. He invited area XO owners to come talk about our computers as well as have the opportunity to network with others in the community. One blogged about it here.

About 10-15 laptops were present at peak. We gathered around a large conference table in the resource room and quickly got to work. Liam was beyond excited to have so many “friends” show up on his neighborhood view. [...]

The kid takes to it like a duck to water, and pretty soon, he is "demoing" his computer skills to a very receptive audience. Amazing.

I once had a look at the "Sugar" software operating system used on the OLPC computers. I hated it. Most adults do, because it's too different from what we know. It's made to appeal to children who have little or no experience with computers. Even very young children. And apparently, they DO find it appealing. The OLPC project is now expanding to include US schools, with Birmingham, Alabama being the first major project here.

I posted earlier about a 10 year old British boy whose journalist father gave him a OLPC computer, only to be amazed at what the kid could do with it, and how enthusiastic he was. As more and more children are exposed to this, it seems apparent that they are very receptive to it. I find that fascinating for a variety of reasons.

I only became exposed to personal computers when I was in my mid twenties. I'm talking Timex-Sinclair and Commodore 64. I've been a computer geek ever since. But I had a childhood void of personal computers.

These kids I've posted about are part of a new wave that is just beginning. A wave of children who are being introduced to computers at a very early age. And not just rich kids in the classrooms of expensive schools, but kids from all backgrounds, everywhere.

Nothing like this has ever happened before, so we can't quite know what all the consequences will be. Like so many things, I expect there will be a mixture of good and bad. I'm not complaining about it. Even if there were a significant number of people who wanted to stop it or slow it down, I don't think it would be possible. A fully interconnected internet world is arriving now, where even children all over the planet will be able to talk to each other. It's happening NOW, right before our eyes.

In developing nations where the laptops are being used, the parents of children are asking their kids to look up stuff on the internet for them. By proxy, a whole bunch of new adults are being introduced to the internet. There is even talk now of designing a simple inexpensive laptop device like the OLPC XO, that's made for adults. This is a trend that could have big cultural effects world wide.

I love using computers. They can be very helpful tools. But they can be used for lots of other purposes as well, like entertainment and communications, a link to mass media and all the good and bad stuff that comes with it.

I remember as a kid, growing up in the 60's and 70's, listening to the old folks complain about Television being the "boob tube". They said watching too much television made people "stupid". Old folks back then remembered what life was like before the TV existed. Now many years laster, as I look at young kids and computers and the internet, I think I understand better what those old folks were seeing.

TV isn't reality. It's entertainment, fantasy. Sure sometimes it's educational or informative, but it has a large fantasy element. It isn't the REAL world, though it does interact with and claim to represent the real world, it is in so many ways, 2nd hand notions, 2nd hand experiences, unproven ideas and wild imaginings.

The same goes for the internet, but because it is interactive, perhaps it's even more so. Computers themselves are like extensions of our minds, or at least mind tools, as we interact with them so closely with our minds. Plug that into the mass media, the collective or race mind, and then spend too much time immersed in it and... I think you can lose touch with reality. You start living in a world of ideas and imagination, and stop seeing the world the way it really is, and stop seeing people the way they really are.

Our advanced Western culture is becoming so obsessed with electronics and multimedia, you would have to wonder how we will cope if an EMP pulse fries all of our electronics and we suddenly find ourselves living in a world with only the technology of the 1870's available to us? Would we understand enough about reality and the basics of living to survive?

I love computers and the internet, but I love reality too. I see computers and the internet as tools, and as entertainment to some degree. That's all for the good. I just think we have to be very careful not to lose ourselves in them, and thus our connection to reality. With children being indoctrinated into the computer lifestyle so early in life, I have to wonder if they will be able to even understand what I am talking about, much less why it is important.


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