Is all current television equipment becoming worthless?

[Mark Lloyd]

Some people will need a VCR to play tapes from a large collection. You will have trouble finding one in a local store by then. They will be sold on some website.

[Mark Lloyd]

That happened with beta. You may still be able to find tapes on the internet. I haven't looked, since I no longer have any need for them.

[Jim Yanik]

Keith wrote in news: [e-mail]:

If their market wants it,yes.

If the market was there,why not? In this case,the gov't is trying to create a NEW market,and doing it by first shutting down an older one already in place and working well.

Wrong,the PEOPLE own the airwaves.

[Keith]

Not hardly. Think compression.

The government has interests in satandards. There was good reason for NTSC.

Wrong. The government is the agent of the people. The government owns the airwaves. Don't like it? Vote 'em out. *We* have no power, except through the government.

I see you didn't care to comment...

[Edwin Pawlowski]

I don't think they own them, but they do control them.

[mm]

Ms. Jennifer is either too young, or didn't or doesn't pay attention, or had bad sources. Because this is the biggest change in the industry since broadcasting began.

Color tv has nothing to do with it.

When color tv began it was called ":compatible color". NBC, the leader, would announce, "The following is brought to you in compatible color." I was curious what that meant and 20 years or so later found out. It meant that color tvs could receive and use black and white signals, and that black and white tvs could receive and use color signals.

That's why we still can use b&w and color tvs interchangeably, after

50 years. In fact I still have a tv from the 50's that I haven't used for about 20 years but should still work. (It was built as if it were a suitcase. It's heavy but actually portable from the one handle, although I'm missing the cover. But the tuner was dirty and spraying cleaner was hard to do. Still, in 73 it was my only tv for 5 months or more, and it was good enough. For some stations, I had to jiggle the channel knob a bit to get the tuner to a clean spot, so ruthlessly changing stations every 2 minutes didn't work well..)

This time there will be no compatiblity.

I think I can hook the converter inbetween my attic antenna and my vcr array, and only need one converter for the whole house, but it will mean running upstairs a lot. I have no room and not enough money for a converter in every room.

For outdoors, Iguess I'll have to have a run of cable stored in the hall closet, to go with the extension cord I use now.

And my 2 inch tv, which was a prize and I've barely used, (100 dollar coupon to a store that sold nothing I wanted) will be worthless.

Remove NOPSAM to email me. Please let me know if you have posted also.

[Jim]

Some people never realize that having control over the government is largely a pervasive myth.

[Beachcomber]

Back in the days before the de-Regulation of the Broadcast Industry, the concept was that "the people" owned the radio spectrum and that the FCC was the gov. agency charged with stewardship to insure that this resource was managed for maximum benefit for all.

At some point about 10-15 years ago, this changed, and Congress and the FCC decided that spectrum allocations could be bought and sold by private individuals and organizations. The billions of dollars that they took in was used to make payments against the national debt.

This is why we have, in the larger markets, a Cingular, a Nextel, a Sprint, etc.

Beachcomber

[clifto]

Mm hm. The media covered the lightup >> It's unreasonable that I am FORCED to change by government fiat,instead of

I agree. It shows that people by and large didn't want this, and wouldn't pay for it unless outright forced to do so.

[clifto]

We know what bullshit is. One form of it is using inappropriate, invalid comparisons to form an argument, like saying that everything that is old is bad.

Do you drive an automobile, a standard of transportation that's over 100 years old? Hypocrite! Do you use knives, spoons and/or forks to eat? Hypocrite! That technology is hundreds of years old. Wear shoes? Hypocrite! Shoes are thousands-of-years-old technology. Take a train? Airplane? Jet? Use gravity-fed running water in your home? Flush toilet? Hypocrite, hypocrite, HYPOCRITE!

People replace old technology with new when the price-performance ratio of new technology exceeds that of old technology... or when they're forced to do so by government fiat. That's why I don't use a 50-year-old modem, not because it's fifty years old but because new technology is faster AND cheaper. At my location, you couldn't equal the price-performance ratio I get from NTSC. If you gave me a few HDTVs *and* a few thousand dollars, I'd still be behind. And so would most everyone.

[clifto]

I figure that I'd have to build a quad stacked array of log periodic antennas with a special precision rotor-and-tilt mechanism and revolvers for the individual antennas, and put it all atop a 50' or higher tower. Never mind that there are about a hundred homes within 25 miles who aren't restricted from doing that by covenant, never mind that I can't afford five figures for an antenna system, I'd never spend it just to get television.

Oh, you want service in emergencies. Right here, Harv. For that you need our special $50,000 survival RV.

Someone will, by the time the 2009 FAO Schwartz catalog comes out. It'll come in at 50 pounds weight and a cost of $12,000, with optional 500AH deep-discharge battery for $100 each (one battery runs the set for 45 minutes).

[clifto]

Oh, boy! More infomercials! More 24-hour sales channels!

[clifto]

I get about two months between service visits for the same thing on Comcast. Funny, they were extremely finicky about setting up the cable modem to just exactly so much signal, no more no less, and the modem seldom if ever has an outage. But getting to see half a program (ten seconds at a time, then ten seconds of freeze, pixellation and blackout) is a regular treat here.

[clifto]

I started my full-time professional career in television service in 1967, got comprehensive MATV training from RCA Service in 1969, and first taught TV servicing in college in 1972. I'm not going for Beachcomber's bafflegab either.

[clifto]

Then you DO understand that what a majority of the American people want is what they already have, and that they resent being forced into more expenditures for less quality.

Yes, I said less quality. Don't even TRY to tell me that filtering your fancy signal through a converter box and running it down to NTSC won't degrade the quality. That's assuming I build the phased array needed to replace my rabbit ears, or the converter box won't get any signal at all.

[clifto]

Oh, we can see that. The fact that they're doing it NOW proves it.

No. Not until you consider the billions of dollars of wasted equipment now in use and the billions (if not trillions) of dollars of equipment needed just to bring the country back to the status quo. This is just another income transfer, from the sweat of our backs to the Congress' wastrel pork barrels.

[clifto]

Do you buy shoes because your job requires it? Time for you to get a new job. Shoes are thousand-year-old technology. Your 2006 automobile is now four months old; time to trade it in. When was your living space built? I hope not before 2005. And I just know you have 100-gigabit fiber to your house, right?

Again, the bullshit argument that old equals bad.

[clifto]

I took two 1984 televisions out of service last year because I got sets with bigger screens and closed captioning. The sets need nothing more than an exterior cleaning and interior dusting; their pictures are every bit as good as the sets that replaced them (and in one case, better).

I drive a 1989, 1 1991 and a 1994. I can work on my own cars without thousands of dollars of test equipment. I have no use for an auto that loses 20% of its value the moment I buy it, because I bought it.

Until 2009, anyway.

It's ten pounds per month. And you'd have at least two major television networks with excellent programming and no commercials. Contrast that with the prices that cable is going to want once they're in a monopoly position to extort; I figure digital basic service will be about $100 per month by then.

[clifto]

It's not hard to find decent televisions in the newspapers and garage sales and flea markets for $25 and under, considerably less than the cost of a convertor, or even what a convertor will be once they're building them in the millions.

[clifto]

You really hate that Constitution, don't you?