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Georgef551

Digital TV changeover

USA: Are you ready for the digital TV switchover?  

41 members have voted

  1. 1. USA: Are you ready for the digital TV switchover?

    • Yes!
      11
    • No.
      3
    • Have cable/satellite/etc. Doesn`t matter.
      27


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For most people here in the States, this would really affect those with secondary TV's, or portables they take to sporting events, camping, and the like.
Are you ready for the DTV switchover? I'm sure most of you have cable/sattelite, so that doesn't matter. Any TV's using antennas, get ready.
As for portables, there are converter boxes that run of batteries, as well as portables capable of DTV reception.
I'll showcase one of them in the future, on my YouTube channel. It is an Insignia 7" from Best Buy, but they no longer sell it, because it's sold under another name, in Radio Shack. (Like any portable, reception isn't as good as the big guys, but with the right antenna, this model does a fairly good job. The built-in antenna doesn't work worth a crap, though. This is why people gave it an epic fail raiting. It really isn't that bad.)
Anyway, time to upgrade if you haven't.

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Dang it, I was ready for the first switchover date, and was kind of annoyed that they moved it back. I mean, on the whole, I'm glad I got my converter box, as the digital channels come in much more clearly, but eh... It's just that they were running those commercials about the switch nonstop, and then at the last minute moved it back five months, which means more of those commercials.

Of course, I know it's kind of backwards these days to be using rabbit ears when everyone has cable, but I don't want to pay for it because I hardly ever watch TV anyway, and all the shows that I watch that are on cable are available online through hulu and the like.

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I finally broke down and got cable last year, so I've been ready for quite some time. The local news stations have been running ads for the last two years, so quite frankly if you're not ready/haven't been warned, then you don't watch TV anyway. I do wish there was some way I could only subscribe to Discovery, History Channel, Comedy Central, and Adult Swim and cut my bill down though. Seems like a scam paying for 100 channels when you only watch four.

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First I had rabbit ears (ugh), then I had Time Warner (yay!), now I'm on U-Verse (get me out of here!!!!!) because Time Warner got a little bit expensive.

In any case, yeah, I'm ready.

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I believe my cable company (Cablevision) already supports this but again I don't watch standard broadcast TV very much, if at all.

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In Greece, there are only a couple of state-owned exclusive terrestrial digital channels, and then only in major cities. If a changeover is imminent, none is speaking about it (it is possible to buy decoders for cheap though, only that there's not much to use them for).

Plus, there are a lot of nationwide private networks, and a number of important regional or local TV stations that are not very likely to jump on the DTV bandwagon overnight.

Maybe in 10 years from now, or so. Or everybody will just make a Nova subscription (digital satellite) which rebroadcasts more channels than you'd want to see, anyway.

@Csonigo:

fail :-(

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Dammit. I bought a TV Tuner for my Game Gear finally a few months ago because my parents would never buy me one when I was growing up.

Pretty piece of uselessness now I suppose.

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I work for a DVR company that works with Cable, Satellite and most importantly, Antenna. Over 80% of our customers using our product with an OTA will have to upgrade their box, and my company is not offering any kind of discount. It sucks. Makes my job harder, explaining to a 90 year old woman on the phone that she needs to upgrade her 10 year old DVR to a new 600 dollar one is not a lot of fun.

Plus Cable Providers hate us which means we have to deal with them more now. Talking to a Comcast/Time Warner/ATT/Cox/Charter/Wave/Brighthouse representative for 2 hours to fix their issues is a pain in the ass.

And fxck Comcast.

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In my quiet little corner of the globe it'll be another 3.5 - 4 years before analogue broadcast's cease, which gives the broadcasters plenty of time to phase out of programs I might like to watch.

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Too bad we couldn't choose more than one. I need to check both Yes and Doesn't Matter as my TVs are all digital with the proper tuners AND I also have Dish Network.

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I would rather have an "I wish REoL would stop posting stupid pointless polls" option.

Also, elsewhere, Doom_Dude added an "I'm not an American!" option to the poll, because this is quite presumptuous that everyone lives in the USA and could possibly give a shit about whether the Americans are ready or not.

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The DTV changeover is affecting pretty much everyone in the Western World (yeah, that includes Pinko Europe), although not at the same rate. In the EU, some states have been over-eager to force a transition (some did a complete change before the US), while others are much more lax about it.

I guess it's easier in those countries that already had an established cable TV service (and consumer mentality) while OTA was secondary e.g. in Switzerland OTA was pretty useless for years, Germany had an extensive cable service and so on. In countries like Italy or Greece though, OTA TV was and still is important and people are not used to the idea of setting up anything more complex than a condo antenna to watch state, private and regional TV (except those paying for sports channels and the such).

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TheDigitalNomad said:

I would rather have an "I wish REoL would stop posting stupid pointless polls" option.

Also, elsewhere, Doom_Dude added an "I'm not an American!" option to the poll, because this is quite presumptuous that everyone lives in the USA and could possibly give a shit about whether the Americans are ready or not.


Come the digital switchover in Britain there's going to be a great many old people wondering why "the box" has suddenly stopped working for no reason.

They hear the word "digital" and switch off, presuming it's too complicated for them.

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deathbringer said:

Come the digital switchover in Britain there's going to be a great many old people wondering why "the box" has suddenly stopped working for no reason.

They hear the word "digital" and switch off, presuming it's too complicated for them.

That's part of why the deadline was pushed back. Hawaii made the transition early, and TV stations and whatnot were bombarded with scared and confused old people who had apparently missed all of the commercials that had been playing endlessly for months.

Well, that and the fact that the government had run out of coupons for the converter boxes, but yeah, the first experiment in switching over was a disaster.

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geekmarine said:

the first experiment in switching over was a disaster.


As it would be expected of any other case of "fixing" what is not broken, OTAH.

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We have satellite on all our television sets except for the one in my room, which uses old-tyme rabbit ears and barely got any channels to begin with. The only one that comes through clearly is in Spanish. I figure I probably won't bother getting the digital converter box, since we already have satellite elsewhere in the house and the one in my room is mostly there so I have something to hook the NES to.

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geekmarine said:

Dang it, I was ready for the first switchover date, and was kind of annoyed that they moved it back. I mean, on the whole, I'm glad I got my converter box, as the digital channels come in much more clearly, but eh... It's just that they were running those commercials about the switch nonstop, and then at the last minute moved it back five months, which means more of those commercials.

Of course, I know it's kind of backwards these days to be using rabbit ears when everyone has cable, but I don't want to pay for it because I hardly ever watch TV anyway, and all the shows that I watch that are on cable are available online through hulu and the like.

Same here. I use the OTA signals because I also don't watch enough TV to justify a $100 bill.
I was annoyed with the 2/17/09 delay, Obama said people weren't ready, and it needed to be moved, and there's no mention of another pushback, in fact, WBZ 4 (30.1 digital) in Boston announced after the 12 o' clock news, the analog signal will officially be no more.

I know this might shock the Obama worshippers, but I have to give him credit here. He did get this one right. The bonus for the pushback was the analog signal was still there if the digital one didn't work. Now it's literally all, or nothing.

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Georgef551 said:

Obama worshippers


Dude, seriously, are you at least making a decent buck out of this? You're free to come up with your own rants or you're issued material to copy-paste verbatim?

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Maes said:

In the EU, some states have been over-eager to force a transition (some did a complete change before the US)

Like in Finland, here digital TV was first officially taken in use in 2001 (there had been some local test broadcasts before), and analog broadcasts were, for the most part, removed in 2007. Regardless of basically a six year changeover period, numerous commercials and articles in different medias about digital TV it still managed cause problems for quite a few people (not to mention the early adapters feeling cheated that the final changeover date was being pulled for quite a while).

Still, in a country where cable TV is not taken for granted, quite a few people were also happy that now they could get a lot more channels than they previously could.

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Since I am American, this does apply, but like Nomad said, where's an "I'm not an American" option when you need one? USA != Earth

Seriously though, we should be more than ready at this point. First they advertised the shit out of it for over a year, then they decide to postpone it for another six months?! Come on. People apparently can't get their shit together in terms of either properly explaining a relatively simple procedure or going through with said switch--I'd guess it's both.

Not that it really matters. Internet >>>>>> TV.

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Jodwin said:

Like in Finland, here digital TV was first officially taken in use in 2001 (there had been some local test broadcasts before), and analog broadcasts were, for the most part, removed in 2007. Regardless of basically a six year changeover period, numerous commercials and articles in different medias about digital TV it still managed cause problems for quite a few people (not to mention the early adapters feeling cheated that the final changeover date was being pulled for quite a while).

Still, in a country where cable TV is not taken for granted, quite a few people were also happy that now they could get a lot more channels than they previously could.

We actually were suposed to go all digital on 12/31/06, but not even 75% of TV STATIONS were ready, nevermind the 1% who had a DTV (I was ready since summer 2K2).
Then came 2/17/09, nope. Too many people were not ready, and were blacked out on DTV test days. Now it's 6/12/09, and it's final.

I made a video of a portable DTV you can buy at Radio Shack. It's a Best Buy Insignia, but it's under their name, and with different trim, but it's exactly the same. I did find only ONE other portable.
Due to the 15-minute run time on the video, it was severely hacked to fit within YouTube's 10-minute time limit. It'll be posted tomorrow at the earliest. Don't have time to upload it today.

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Encouraging Doom Dude to add an "I'm not American!" option was the best decision I've made all week. ;)

We were getting those commercials on American channels. Our cable company started covering them (using sloppy editing) with commercials telling everybody not to worry. Good thing too. My mom was freaking out for a bit. It was funny. She apparently didn't hear the part in the commercials about it only applying to people without cable/satellite.

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Aliotroph? said:

Encouraging Doom Dude to add an "I'm not American!" option was the best decision I've made all week. ;)


Hay, where is the 'I'm not American' option? :p

Ahh well, back to ground zero. Hmmm, maybe time to play some Fallout 3.

Alio it's weird seeing you without a Winona avatar. heh.

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