I got my digital TV cards in the mail today. This is not the most urgent thing for me, because I always have cable. As for the whole forced conversion thing, it makes little sense. Congress should not have had a deadline, and just let the conversion happen naturally as stations change over and people buy new sets. Maybe it is a form of corporate welfare to TV makers and converter box makers or something. After all, the government didn't force a conversion from 8-track to cassette, or from AM radio to FM radio, or from black-and-white televisions to color televisions. My main analog set does quite well, and I feel no need for digital signals at this time. I've got digital cable. My only complaint is that when you change channels, it takes a long time for the new channel to come in (but I guess all digital cable systems and satellite signals have this problem)
I can write a lot more about how Congress has messed up the TV situation with meddlesome laws. About the "local carry" law meant that the local cable company was forced to take 4 network affiliates off its dial, and we never had an actual UPN station as a direct consequence of the law.... making it difficult to see "Star Trek: Voyager", "Star Trek: Enterprise".... or even the "Dilbert" cartoon, which I once saw at 1 AM Monday morning. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in its first run remained nothing but a rumor to me because of this law which censored the UPN network off my cable line-up and prevented the WB from properly showing shows when it was supposed to.
One of the nice things about having two affiliates for each network, was that whenever one affiliate decided wipe out prime time shows, the other affiliate would show them. This happened a lot with Billy Graham Crusades, which would run on prime time on one NBC affiliate, but not the other. Or once our local network affiliate decided that "Beetlejuice" was bad, so they showed a very lame made-for-TV movie from the 1970s instead of airing the network television premiere of "Beetlejuice" that many of us were looking forward to seeing. Boy did that station get telephone complaints the next day...
But back to the converter boxes. ...
But anyway, I do have a TV that is not cable, and the box will be useful for that once Congress kills the analog signal in February. How is everyone handling this? Has anyone gotten a box yet, and does it work? Which ones do you recommend? I've also heard that if you buy a broken/DOA box, you are stuck and cannot take it back, and wonder if it is true.
11 comments:
We have cable on our two sets so this will be a non-event for us. My mom and dad however, will have to get a box. Their grandson, my nephew, Manuel will be in charge of getting them hooked up. I hope it goes smoothly for them. They have a hard time with change.
We have the digital cable boxes on two sets.. and regular cable on one.. I prefer the digital channels over the regular ones due to there being more variety on the digital packages.. we pay a huge price, but includes long distance phone and internet.. as far as I know we are not affected here by the new law in January.
I don't have cable and my TV is connected to a Series 2 TiVo. I need a converter box specifically designed for this model of TiVo. So far there isn't one.
If I get rid of cable, I am down to one and a half channels. This means lots of "Ellen" and lots of "Two and a Half Men". No "Crusoe" either.
We got a box, we hooked it up, and got this weird loud-speaker echo thing. We switched it off and are not looking forward to having to use it.
I have satellite, so I am not involved.
I share your skepticism, though. I am pretty sure there is a technical reason for it that I've read somewhere or other, but I don't remember what it is. But, similar to the bailout, all we get from them is, "Well...uh....we gotta."
This is, indeed, an example of corporate welfare. The "urgency" was not to bring us the wonders of HDTV, but to prepare to sell off part of the bandwidth of the public airwaves.
It's a non-issue for me because I gave up on TV years ago when my handy ice dam removers cut my antenna lead by accident. (In all fairness, they did fix it with duct tape but it turned out I had other things to do anyway . . . )
we have cable, so it doesn't matter. I have friends who bought the box, but they haven't said much about how it works for them.
Thanks for reminding me about this. I keep forgetting. I just applied for my coupon! I only have one tv and no cable. I hope these converter boxes actually work...
Thinking about this further, I, personally, would just cut the damn thing off entirely. My wife and son would freak out, so I wouldn't actually do it, but Lord, I consider it.
All the really great television, you can get on DVD, and for sports, just go to a bar.
One of my favorite book series, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson, at one point has the narrator note that the bar has a television that it takes out for "assassinations, coronations, and moon landings."
Increasingly, that seems like a good rule.
I read and loved "Callahan's".
The TV description fits a place where I worked. I had a TV on a shelf "just in case". It came out the morning of 9/11, and stayed on for two or three days. Then it was turned off.
Later, it was turned on when they launched John Glenn into space. I guess that is close enough to "moon landing". I don't recall it being used for anything else besides these two events.
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