Copper
05-10-2007, 02:56 PM
For those of you who remember having only four television stations that came through clearly in the early 80s, the advent of Cable TV was a big deal: we'd now get more variety and stations would come through clearly no matter what, and there was no more messing around with the bunny ears to get good reception.
Fast forward to 2007 and nowadays the big buzz word is High Def and Digital TV--and it seems the FCC has bought into this big time, cause according to DTVtransition.org (http://www.dtvtransition.org/) on February 17, 2009 the analog system will be shut off and it'll be all digital. Sounds great, right? Well keep in mind despite how ubiquitous cable TV seems to be these days, there are still 20 million households that still rely on analog signals for broadcast TV, and a lot of these people are from low income communities that wouldn't even dream of updating to the digital revolution because of more pressing concerns like paying rent and putting food on the table.
Apparently you can still use existing antennas to pick up DTV signals, but this requires a converter that costs 70-80 bucks. It looks like they're going to send special coupons worth $40 bucks to lower income households so they can still watch broadcast TV on an analog set. I'm still not sure how effective that will be, because it's forcing people to adapt to a new technology whether they want to or not.
What do you all think?
Fast forward to 2007 and nowadays the big buzz word is High Def and Digital TV--and it seems the FCC has bought into this big time, cause according to DTVtransition.org (http://www.dtvtransition.org/) on February 17, 2009 the analog system will be shut off and it'll be all digital. Sounds great, right? Well keep in mind despite how ubiquitous cable TV seems to be these days, there are still 20 million households that still rely on analog signals for broadcast TV, and a lot of these people are from low income communities that wouldn't even dream of updating to the digital revolution because of more pressing concerns like paying rent and putting food on the table.
Apparently you can still use existing antennas to pick up DTV signals, but this requires a converter that costs 70-80 bucks. It looks like they're going to send special coupons worth $40 bucks to lower income households so they can still watch broadcast TV on an analog set. I'm still not sure how effective that will be, because it's forcing people to adapt to a new technology whether they want to or not.
What do you all think?