The drop dead date for analog televisions in the United States is now December 31, 2008, according to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That’s the new deadline for a total shift to all digital television. A spring 2009 date has apparently been scrapped. Included in the bill is a $990 million subsidy provision that would fund converter boxes for the millions of customers who don’t have enough money to buy a new digital television. USAToday, Mark Shubin and TV Technology have more.
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As USA Today explains it:
The 66 analog television channels — from 2 to 69; there is no channel 37— take up 396 MHz of space on that road.
But, because a digital TV signal doesn’t need a 6 MHz-wide lane, the switch to digital would mean all the TV stations on the dial only need 288 MHz. There would be 108 MHz freed up.
But it’s not just 108 MHz of any space — it’s 108 MHz in the Very High Frequency (VHF) part of the spectrum. In the radio world, that’s prime real estate because (for reasons you’ll need to ask your nearest physics teacher about) you don’t need a lot of power to send a signal a long way.
USA Today is mistaken.
HDTV needs 6 Mhz wide channels…same as it ever was. The reason more spectrum is now available is because digital channels can be adjacent, where analog channels can’t. Previously (empty) analog television channels had to be inserted between different broadcast channels. In addition, broadcasters were given an extra (second) channel to began digital broadcasting. Now they’ll have to give one of them back in 2008.
Receiving DTV off the air if you’ve got rabbit ears will be difficult. The four DTV finalists in the United States were assigned by the FCC to come up with a single (ATSC) standard for DTV (with royalty payments). They rejected an arguably better European system (DVB) that uses multi-path rejecting COFDM — possibly because it had no payola for the gang of four.
Today, UK viewers get 30 Digital television channels…free. How many do you get?
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