ProVideo Coalition.com: Bruce's Blog by Bruce A. Johnson

Today is February 18, 2009, the day after roughly half of the US analog TV transmitters were shut off for the last time. While I didn’t see any of it happen with my own two eyes, all of the Madison stations that pulled the plug (The Fox affiliate and Wisconsin Public TV are staying on in analog for now) did it with some fanfare, with the ABC affiliate even showing one of their engineers actually pushing the “off” button for real. Others played the National Anthem, showed fireworks, and some went to the Indian Head test pattern that was the staple of broadcasting for many years. Of course, today’s generation can look on this with bemusement, because these days it is a rare event for a TV station to ever go off the air. (Search Youtube with “analog shutoff” and you’ll see almost a hundred submissions - I assume many more will be posted in the coming days.)

So anyway, this morning I see an email from a colleague with a link to an FCC tool that compares the theoretical coverage maps of stations before and after the analog shutdown. It is located here. Fair warning - I couldn’t get the app to work in Firefox, but once I went to the Internet Explorer rendering engine all was fine. It is fascinating, instructive information, and when used in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Association’s Antennaweb.org could be quite predictive of what viewers might - or might not - see in the post-analog age.

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I also watched the analog power down yesterday on several channels. Then my TV went to static.

Yes, I have a convertor box. But I have decided to see if I can live without the OTA signal going to my moving picture box, for a month at least. The main reason for this experiment is to see if could use the Internet to replace OTA signal. I have a decent Internet connection, a wide screen laptop, a PS3 for playback on my TV if I wish, and patience. Can I replace my current viewing habit with one that is constrained by what is available on the Internet?

We’ll see how long this experiment will last.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 02/18 at 12:07 PM

Done yet?

<g>

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 02/19 at 10:46 PM

I’ve been watching only OTA DTV for four years now, using a Samsung ATSC tuner connected to a 1920x1080 screen via HDMI.

I get something like 40 stations in full digital clarity (from West L.A.), including a lot of broadcast HDTV that looks better than any cable or satellite connection I have ever seen (because the signal hasn’t been re-compressed to a sliver of its original bandwidth).

This with a small $20 set-top antenna (Zenith/Philips ZHDTV1) that is just a foot long, pointing out the window (I suppose I could get more than that with an SUV-size antenna on the roof).

And you know what the monthly bill for OTA TV is, right?

:O)

On the other subject, I thought the entire Federal government had learned form the Katrina debacle?

You don’t recall? It was discovered that key government agencies had drunk a certain brand of Kool-Aid, so they had made their emergency information web sites only accessible through Internet Explorer.

This made it impossible for people in temporary shelters to access these sites through the low-budget Linux machines that had been donated, and of course also a problem for Mac users, and possibly today also a non-starter for people with smartphones other than the creaky Windows Mobile.

IE has a lot of security issues to start with, but the worst is that the Feds would limit access to only one vendor’s browser.

Why wouldn’t they support open standards that work well in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and, yes, Internet Explorer (with extra HTML code to deal with its exceptions!).

Let’s hope for an Executive Order to stop this bull before the next big trouble happens.

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So Analog TV Has Gone Away…