In article , snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com (Rick Brandt) writes: | Brian Attwood wrote: | >
| > Just a nitpick, the govt is mandating a change to digital (DTV) | > broadcast not HDTV broadcast. All HDTV is DTV but not all DTV is | > HDTV. Some broadcasters may choose to broadcast in HDTV, but others | > may choose to broadcast in standard definition and offer multiple | > channels or use the "extra" bandwidth in other ways. | | Which is what they will do the majority of the time. We will end up with mostly | standard quality digital and 50 more channels all showing infomercials.
Or pay services, e.g.,
I'm about 40 miles from Boston and all our local stations are now broadcasting digital. Most of them I can receive most of the time, but WLVI's digital signal is usually unviewable. I've tried several different receivers. (The analog version on 56 was/is always fine.) I had hoped that they were doing some sort of low power test, but this seems to be the production setup. My UHF antenna is 20 feet up on a tower and I'm not sure I can easily raise it. Of course, I'd have a lot more incentive to work on this if I had a converter/receiver that provided good VCR support or a DVR with an ATSC tuner and functionality comparable to the Panasonic DMR that I use. :)
I wonder if there's a market for a multi-channel converter box for people with lots of analog equipment? It could decode 5-10 DTV signals and modulate NTSC versions on a local cable at fixed channels. If converter boxes will really sell for $50 then (a) this should be economically possible and (b) you could even build it with a rack of those $50 boxes and some modulators. Of course, there is still the problem of selecting the aspect ratio conversion. I suppose with two converters per digital station you could make both formats available to all devices...
Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com