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Maes

DTV changeover, the wrong way.

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OK, so we have ranted and raved about DTV changeover before. For the most optimistic of us, it will -allegedly- clearly be a win-win situation. For the most conservative of us (like me) it's probably going to be a mixed blessing for a variety of reasons.

However, in Greece they managed to fuck it up completely and make it, so far, a clearly win-lose affair. Win for the TV stations (assuming they cut down their bandwidth licensing costs, since they fitted 4 stations into 1 channels), but a total ripoff for consumers.

Let me explain:

ERT Digital (the state owned digital TV) exists for some time now (since 2005 I think) broadcasting 4 new thematic, free-to-air "plus" channels in MPEG-2. They supposedly are broadcasting in all urban centers above 30K inhabitants, but in practice only major cities like Athens or Thessaloniki have coverage.

In other cases, such as in my hometown, they are broadcasting in a way that breaks most DVB-T receivers (they flag the stream as "encrypted" while it's not). Since I got my DVB-T receiver a few months ago for Eur 30, only to discover that it's blind, I wasn't too pleased when I found this out. People got the message too and sales of those receivers plummeted in the local market.

I found some use for it now that I moved in a bigger city, but all there's to watch are the four "Plus" channels and a rebroadcast of a Cypriot channel, in what appears to be crappy "PC mpeg" quality straight from 1997.

However, surprise surprise, now they changed the tune: the changeover will be served by a new company, Digea, on whose transmitters all major national-range TV stations will piggyback. They already started broadcasting a bundle of the 6 major national-range private channels, but with one catch: MPEG-4. MPEG-FUCKING-FOUR.

This makes all DVB-T decoders sold until now useless but for watching just the four state-owned "plus" channels (which will eventually switch to MPEG4 too). This caught everybody unprepared: retailers are "killing" any leftover MPEG-2 receivers (Eur 30 -> 10 price reductions are common), and early adopters are gonna be left with a fistful of flies.

Furthermore, the new MPEG-4 receivers retail for significatly higher than the MPEG-2 ones ever did: Eur 60-80, plus they are probably going to be conditional-access through a one-off subscription SIM, so you can only get them from Digea-approved outlets.

And no, there are no state-sanctioned changeover coupons or anything yet. Great way to get things started, huh?

What murks things even more, is that there's already a digital satellite TV company, Nova, which already re-broadcasts all national private and state-owned channel through its infrastructure. Those people having reception problems with terrestrial analog already switched to Nova, despite it needing a sat dish, a monthly subscription etc. In places where analog TV has good quality anyway, there's even less incentive to switch over to either, from the consumer's side.

It's gonna be interesting to see how this will turn out.

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Maes said:

In places where analog TV has good quality anyway, there's even less incentive to switch over to either, from the consumer's side.

If the Australian experience is any guide, your government's already picked a date to switch off the analogue service. I have direct line of sight to the local transmitter towers, an excellent analogue signal (which goes in the first half of 2013) and a bunch of digital channels that are prone to drop-outs despite an 80% or better signal strength. Not looking forward to the switchover.

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GreyGhost said:

If the Australian experience is any guide, your government's already picked a date to switch off the analogue service.


Yup, it's supposed to be the end of 2012 for national range channels, and 2015 for all the rest (regional, local). So far they did a half-assed job at making it pass as something positive though, and needless to say consumer reaction is still chilly.

No wonder, as in the end it boils down to -almost- a threat to shell out Eur 80 to keep watching what you already could watch for free.

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GreyGhost said:

If the Australian experience is any guide

And also the Finnish case, we've already been without analog for a while now.

In Finland the DTV wasn't as big a failure as in Greece, although it did have its delays and countless other issues, such as the early receivers being simply put utter shit. However what is causing issues to some is a recent trend of pay channels - which have been very rare in Finland until now. They require having a digital receiver that can read pay channel cards, and those are relatively new products. So in that sense early DTV adopters who managed to get a working receiver are forced to splurge on a new one if they want to get pay channels (and a lot of households will, since such viewer magnets as Formula 1 have been moved from free to pay channels).

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Heh didn't think about the card-op/cardless DTV receiver issue until now. Now that you mention it, not all of the MPEG-4 decoders for sale that I've seen have a card slot.

This makes things even more fucked up as many mid-to-high end new TVs come with a built-in DTV receiver, and no card slot. Imagine how "happy" consumers that went the extra mile to get a "DTV ready" set without the need for set-top boxes will be. And wait until HD kicks in...ouch.

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They should've settled on a format to use, prior to rollout.
Here is the States, the FCC and other companies, settled on 18 resolutions and formats which are to be used, and once done, the equipment rolled out to TV stations, and DTV boxes were sold to the public, to be connected to the DTV monitor.
Today, suposedly 3 of the 18 standards are in use: one for 4:3, 720p, and 1080i. That is, unless there was a change.
The only problems we have here, are stations dissapearing, due to a change in their frequency, and possibly interfering with nearby stations on the same physical channel.
In my case, WZMY, 50 (DTV 35) Derry, New Hampshire, had a fairly good analog signal, but their digital one barely works, and sometimes, not so much. Their 35 interferes with a 35 another 30 miles away. End result: losing a station (for a lot of others).
Then again, some are gained. Some religious wacko channel in Worcester Mass (TV 48, forget DTV channel) actually comes in good. Initially, like their analog signal, wasn't clear, and unreliable (as if I have a use for it anyhow).
The BIGGEST DRAWBACK of this system, is it does not error-correct too well. If there's interference, you may lose stations. Other countried adopted standards that would overcome this within reason, to the point that you can have a portable DTV running in the car, and it would work. Try that here, and you'll get squat.

In a nutshell, Greece needed to work out a system first, finalize it, THEN go to market with cunsumers and stations.

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Georgef551 said:

The only problems we have here, are stations dissapearing, due to a change in their frequency, and possibly interfering with nearby stations on the same physical channel.

Heh - a couple of our new digital channels have been allocated non-standard frequencies - consequently - lots of TV's and set-top boxes can't find them when doing a channel scan.

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It's the buyers problem if they buy hardware before a standard is adopted, sorry.

Over here when the changeover was announced and the first DTV compatible tv sets appeared, I'm sure some people bought them and now they have the same problem: they're mpeg-2 while the standard will be mpeg-4. Sucks to be them.

It was the same with people buying the so-called 'HDReady' receivers. Everyone with enough common sense realized they're a scam.

Edit: Since apparently the 'HD ready' tag has legitimate uses elsewhere, in Poland it was hardly anything more than a way for RTV stores to get rid of outdated products.

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GreyGhost said:

Heh - a couple of our new digital channels have been allocated non-standard frequencies - consequently - lots of TV's and set-top boxes can't find them when doing a channel scan.

WOOPS!! That's not suposed to happen! :)
Everything's suposed to be between channels 2 to 51. Some might still be in 52 to 69, or some were dumb enough to accept 2 to 6.

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It's so common to have cable here that a girl who called me to do a phone survey about communication tech in 2005 didn't believe we didn't have cable. I had to explain what "rabbit ears" were. I can't speak for the rest of the country. I know the rural areas in Alberta usually don't have cable, so they might have something to worry about in 2011.

Our cable provider shows a lot of American channels and therefore a lot of American commercials. (On a side note, American commercials are almost always louder and more annoying, especially the local ones.) When the digital TV commercials showed up they confused people like my mom. Then the cable company started splicing their own commercials over top of those ones saying there's no cause for worry.

We're supposed to get DTV in 2011. I haven't even looked into what they're using for standards. I imagine it's identical to the states anyway.

Ironically, most of the people I know who watch a lot of TV are at least 50. Everybody I know who is my age either has something else to do or they get their TV from DVDs or the internet.

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Aliotroph? said:

It's so common to have cable here that a girl who called me to do a phone survey about communication tech in 2005 didn't believe we didn't have cable. I had to explain what "rabbit ears" were. I can't speak for the rest of the country. I know the rural areas in Alberta usually don't have cable, so they might have something to worry about in 2011.

Haha, yeah. I've had a few survey people asking me how much TV I watched. That was their first question. Not if I owned a TV or watched it, just how many hours? They seem a little suspicious when I say "none".

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Danarchy said:

Haha, yeah. I've had a few survey people asking me how much TV I watched. That was their first question. Not if I owned a TV or watched it, just how many hours? They seem a little suspicious when I say "none".


The times, they are a-changin'.

I'm actually watching a little bit more TV this year since it's pretty easy to turn on and sit in front of anything when it's 44 inches from corner to corner.

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Belial said:

It's the buyers problem if they buy hardware before a standard is adopted, sorry.


Every technology reaches a transition/phaseout period at some point, but when this point is soon after the technology was actually introduced in a particular market niche, that's bound to make a few pandas unhappy. It's not that the broadcasts and decoders were available and/or affordable since 10 years ago. The "early adopters" in this case had maybe a couple of years of leeway before the change. I hope they at least allocate some fallback MPEG-2 streams in another bunch of frequencies.

I had to face the same problem when Sat TV broadcasts switched to digital and so our analog receiver (which BTW was the only way to get to see Sat TV) was rendered useless in matter of 1 year (unless you were satisfied with the half and dozen remaining polish and turkish channels). Yeah, changeover was imminent, somewhere in the near future but what should we do, wait until Digital Sat really kicked in? When not even set top boxes were available? Speaking of which, many early adopters of Digital Satellite were left with nonfunctional duds for the same reason.

Georgef551 said:

WOOPS!! That's not suposed to happen! :)
Everything's suposed to be between channels 2 to 51. Some might still be in 52 to 69, or some were dumb enough to accept 2 to 6.


From my understanding of the "future standards", DTV is simply going to occupy the same frequency bands and channels occupied by analog TV, possibly even less.

Which channels those might be of course may vary from place to place. Some TV cards' software for example relied on preset tables for various locales, and the one for Greece was way off: e.g. it still thought we were using SECAM (that's not the case since at least 15 years) and it didn't allow me to seek channels >65 (which were actually used). Luckily 3rd party software could force tuning to channel 69, but just saying...

However other equipment may be programmed with more restrictive assumptions about the channels you're using, without taking new laws etc. into account, and without being as easy to change (a firmware update, if you're lucky).

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Super Jamie said:

Do what I do: don't watch TV. Problem solved.


Hey, I do want my weekend mornings cartoons :-(

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There's different kinds of digital TV? Great. I bet i'm stuffed.

In Britain the switchover is expected to be met with loads of old people who automatically stop listening when they hear the word "digital" to be left confused when there's suddenly no "pictures" on the "box" any more. I think the date keeps getting pushed back though, maybe they're waiting for them to all die first... though maybe Wales has already switched? I don't really pay attention.

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deathbringer said:

I think the date keeps getting pushed back though, maybe they're waiting for them to all die first... though maybe Wales has already switched? I don't really pay attention.


Except it hasn't, it's just that different areas are getting switched over at different times. Wales and North West England changed at the beginning of December but they weren't the first to switch.

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In retrospect, it's incredible how they managed to totally negate one of digital technology's best advantages: its potential versatility/flexibility, its low cost for high processing power, and being designed in an era (post 2000) where allegedly the experiences and mistakes of the past about TV broadcasting and video recording formats etc. would have become lessons learned. Seems not.

I don't "get" how I can buy a Eur. 35 DVD player that will play anything under the sun, including MPEG4 from USB devices and DVDs/CDs, while a stupid TV decoder that can only decode streams costs twice as much. Can the demodulator be so fucking expensive? Fuck that shit.

Asking consumers to "upgrade" an everyday household device with the same frequency they are used to do with "those friggin' 'puters" just doesn't cut it. And sadly with HDTV on the way, even if everyone in the world settles for one particular flavour of MPEG-4 and one particular set of frequencies, they'll have plenty of opportunities to fuck things up with HD or with "future interactive services" *shudder*

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"lol TV" is the only post I can muster. Outdated technology. We have the internet. Welcome to the 21st century.

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Maes said:

In retrospect, it's incredible how they managed to totally negate one of digital technology's best advantages: its potential versatility/flexibility, its low cost for high processing power, and being designed in an era (post 2000) where allegedly the experiences and mistakes of the past about TV broadcasting and video recording formats etc. would have become lessons learned. Seems not.


Unless ofc you realise that learning said lessons would be bad business. (as is kinda hinted at later on in your post)

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There are too many corporations and consortiums involved - each pimping their proprietary "solution" to the problem.

Georgef551 said:

WOOPS!! That's not suposed to happen! :)
Everything's suposed to be between channels 2 to 51. Some might still be in 52 to 69, or some were dumb enough to accept 2 to 6.

VHF channels 10 & 11 were shifed up 1Mhz to make space for channel 9A, they're all invisible to tuners that have the old band-plan in their firmware.

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yeah, I'm goign to have to get a new box soon because channel 23 here broadcasts audio only - which some boxes seem to just choke on.

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The coolest part of the digital changeover here in the states was when 4 of the 7 tvs in my house became massive dust collectors. Thanks a lot digital changeover

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Shaikoten said:

"lol TV" is the only post I can muster. Outdated technology. We have the internet. Welcome to the 21st century.


Internet is basically whatever you can twist and shape it into. For some people it's just browsing basic HTML with a 33.6 kbps modem, and for others it may be an all-in-one, one-off replacement for everything under the sun.

I've already explained in other posts how I feel about wasting bandwidth for streaming "radio", let alone TV. TV is perfect for unidirectional communications, uses its own channels, and doesn't fuck up the underlying network infrastructure for everyone. Imagine if the average white trash airhead bimbo leaves a 5 mbps stream on 24/7 while she's manicuring or eating bon-bons on her trailer's couch while not even watching, and you have to share your precious BW with her and a few other millions like her.

Also, don't forget that network infrastructure is not "always on" like switched telephone lines or traditional airwaves. Thoee are a "use it or lose it" affair and always use the same BW no matter how many users are viewing TV (or if anyone is viewing at all), while packet-switched networks are much more limited, and engineered under the assumption that they will never be used to max potential by everyone at the same time. That's the price for their flexibility.

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I bought my dad a portable TV for christmas since we had to help fill a landfill with our last perfectly working ones. I mess around with it, seemed to work good. Only thing is it could not pick up a single channel. I know how things work and blamed the TV so I hit the internet.

Seems you need an AC powered antenna to boost the signals in my area strong enough to actually watch them. I read every review on amazon and other various places and it seems all portable TVs have similar problems of receiving no channels. The old analog TVs had a bit of a weak signal but I could still watch them. Retarded HD needs a perfect signal or it will refuse to show anything.

To further my rant, ALL the portable TVs have an internal battery with 3-4 hours of battery life. Sucks though when my power is out for a week due to storms and I would need to keep sapping my car's battery(while not watching TV).

Why they the hell cant I just pump a dozen D batteries into a TV anymore and watch semi-fuzzy stations in the boonies. That dozen D batteries will last a whole hurricane season. While the latest awesome new technology will keep my TV on for less than half a night.

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@Catoptromancy: for the same reason why cell phones batteries don't seem last a great deal longer than they did 4 or 5 years ago: OK, so NiMHs was an improvement over NiCad, and LiPo was an improvement over NiMH, with more energy per weight unit but not per volume in actual battery packs.

In fact, safety considerations make it impractical to use the full volume of a LiPo battery in a device that may get hit/crushed/punctured etc. so they add quite a bit of plastic padding around it, to give it its shape and some extra protection. So in practice, LiPo batteries (not raw cells) have about the same energy/volume density as NiMHs.

People want small devices: none would buy a phone with a bulging "extended" battery compartment at the back anymore, like you could with cell phones in the NiMH era. No sireeee, everything must be slick, slim, and with a built-in LiPo now, or else use diminutive AA (if you're lucky) or AAA batteries.

The portable TV you're talking about is probably a slim-line 7" LCD affair. Would you really like it to have a bulging 10 D-cell battery compartment, perhaps thrice as thick as the TV itself? Would you buy it?

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Maes said:
The portable TV you're talking about is probably a slim-line 7" LCD affair. Would you really like it to have a bulging 10 D-cell battery compartment, perhaps thrice as thick as the TV itself? Would you buy it? [/B]


Hell yes! I would buy it. I actually thought of buying an external antenna and using my car converter with an AC adaptor...with an actual car battery to power it. Could plug the external antenna and TV itself into the AC car adapter. Such a small TV and antenna should last quite awhile on a fully charged car battery.

Not handheld. Just a small TV 7-10 inches. I think I saw a CRT version around but it was still internal battery. I am sure that is the only reason for the forced internal battery is to make it smaller. Adding a good amount of near endless and uninterrupted power would just bulk up the unit, but actually make it useful.

One of my old 7" portables was a CRT. The thing was massive and the battery compartment didnt make its overall size much bigger.

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Catoptromancy said:

One of my old 7" portables was a CRT. The thing was massive and the battery compartment didnt make its overall size much bigger.


Heh, same here. I have a combo Radio/CD/B&W 5" CRT TV that works with an external 15V (yes, 15V) adaptor but will accept a 12V+ source such as a car battery or a 12V generic adaptor, if they can deliver enough current.

It has an internal compartment for 10 D-cell batteries, which if filled with high-quality NiMH rechargeables it would probably last 9-10 hours if powering the TV (I measured the drawn current at 1.1 A max).

It even had an option for recharging the batteries when connected to an external power source and yeah, the battery compartment was small compared to the rest of the unit (although when fully laden, it could weigh a ton).

Sadly this was my main and only TV for a certain time, and I also used it to play with my famiclone. Go figure.

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Maes said:

Hey, I do want my weekend mornings cartoons :-(


*L* I've been sucked in by the new Iron Man animation that's just finished showing here in Oz. Each weekend they aired 4 eps back to back late on saturday and then repeated them sunday morning :o)

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If they force the "transition" to digital earlier than expected, with current state of things it will be like being forced to pay Eur 80 to keep watching the same commercial-laden private channels. No, thanks.

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