Mike the Usurper wrote:
This is something that the nationals are rather indifferent to on a level of what they transmit out, but that every local station in the country hates. Their opinion (and it's correct) is that there are currently 12 VHF channels per market and I have never seen a market use all of them, and 60+ UHF channels per market, and I have never heard of ANY market coming close to using even a portion of those.
I thought the problem was that there are some number of the 12 VHF channels per market. The gaps are not consistent, like "no one uses channel 9". They want to reclaim specific channels, and can do so by making all the television broadcasts digital, and so take up less bandwidth.
From A Local Television Station Guide
Another often overlooked aspect of the digital conversion deals with the radio spectrum itself. The great demand for new consumer and commercial wireless radio devices such as Cell Phones, consumer and industrial devices, public safety groups such as police, fire and other public service needs are placing new stress on the somewhat limited radio spectrum. The radio spectrum itself is a finite public resource and there is only so much of it available. The Governments plan is to reclaim some of the current broadcast frequencies, and re-allocate them to these other vital services. The switch to Digital Television will make this change possible. Digital channels can be placed closer together due to the nature of the Digital signal itself, which will free up a large portion of the VHF and UHF spectrum below VHF channel 7 and above UHF channel 51. This has already been done on a smaller scale with the advent of the Cell Phone. Part of the current cellular radio spectrum includes the old UHF channels 81 thru 83.
I remember old televisions could occasionally tune in to analog cell phones.
What the legislation does, it kills over air broadcast and makes it cable or satellite only.
If you mean kills in the sense of "companies won't upgrade and just go off the air" -- perhaps. In the other direction, it may make over-the-air more useful. Transmission of additional out-of-band data is enabled, for things like on-screen-guide data.
For people like me, what this means is that my TV just became a movie watching device. All I watch now is PBS anyway, and forcing PBS to update all of their broadcast equipment to digital will kill them. They barely stay afloat even subsidized.
Became a movie watching device in four years.
Standardizing the tranmission over the satellites makes sense. Doing so in local markets does not. There is a ton of unused space now, this just makes more.
This doesn't touch satellites at all. It doesn't touch cable broadcasts at all. It just says that if you want to broadcast TV, you will have to do it using a digital broadcast; if, in the near future, you want to sell a TV that can receive broadcast TV, it has to be able to receive digital broadcasts.
