FCC Commissioner blasts new TV standard as a 'household tax' Jessica Rosenworcel, a commissioner at America's broadcast watchdog the FCC, has criticized a proposed set of TV standards as a "household tax," due to its lack of backwards compatibility. Addressing a conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington DC this week (we have no idea why either), Rosenworcel complained [PDF] that the …
"apart from games there is no compelling reason to buy into the VR Hype."
But, like 3D, it'll be back again in cycles as each new generation thinks it's "The Next Big Thing". The only downside is that the ever decreasing attention spans of what seems like a majority of the population means the cycles are getting shorter.
If all they wanted to do was add support for 4K they could have added that as an extension to ATSC 1.0 and remained backwards compatible, but they changed its physical layer to use OFDM (i.e. like LTE) instead of 8VSB because it has far better multipath rejection (and works while in motion, because some hopeful fools think people want to watch broadcast TV in moving vehicles on their phones)
Multipath rejection is important because it will allow a TV station to broadcast on the same frequency from multiple towers, instead of currently where you need to broadcast on different frequencies and use PSIP to make it look like the same station. Making it compatible with LTE is important because instead of having just one or a handful of giant towers, they could have one big tower and then a lot of little transmitters on LTE towers to cover areas the big tower can't reach due to terrain. That will be far cheaper than running a bunch of translator towers in mountainous areas out west.
Not having an ATSC 3.0 tuner built into TVs is irrelevant, you'll be able to buy a tuner the size of a pack of cards with an HDMI pigtail on one end, and a coax port and USB port (for power) on the other for $50. They ought to quit mandating TVs have tuners at all (if they don't in the US you can't sell them as televisions, they have to be sold as displays) since the ATSC 1.0 tuner will become less and less important and the QAM tuner is mostly useless as more and more cable systems encrypt even their standard definition signals over the next few years.
Rather than hold back progress, if the FCC was concerned they could subsidize purchase of ATSC 3.0 tuners for people below a certain income level via rebates or something. Given how much money the FCC collected in the recent 600 MHz auction, this would cost only a few percent of those billions.
Excuse me while I ROFLMAO! Being sorta involved when both DVB and ATSC were being developed, I never understood why the Yanks were so stuck on 8VSB. All the tests then in all sorts of environments showed that OFDM was better. Hence most of the rest of the world went with DVB or variants (Japan, Brazil).
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They ought to quit mandating TVs have tuners at all (if they don't in the US you can't sell them as televisions, they have to be sold as displays)
The only thing wrong with that is that they'll want to charge more for displays. The only thing I want the screen in the living room to do is act as a display for the selection of boxes connected to it. Anything off-air comes in via the PVR, anything off-net via the Pi.
"The only thing wrong with that is that they'll want to charge more for displays."
S/want to/already do/
Seriously, you can buy a 4k DVB-T2 TV with displayports cheaper than the displayport-only tunerless version (LG, Samsung, various others)
In fact, if you look at the research both in the lab & in the field, noise & multipath rejection of 8VSB is in most cases on a par with (within a couple of dB) the 64QAM used in DVB-T, and slightly better than that found in 256QAM in DVB-T2. And, despite early concerns, they managed to retrofit SFN operation to it fairly successfully; although not used much in the US due to the market structure there, the few SFNs they do have are comparable to the largest DVB-T SFNs elsewhere.
If they really wanted to improve those factors that much, they would've adopted something similar to the ISDB-T used in Japan, etc. Better noise & mutipath rejection, more flexible SFN operation, hierarchical structure allowing for low power ESB/EW receivers, etc, etc.
In reality, it seems ATSC 1.0's near-complete lack of extendability doomed it.
Lack of extendability was probably a feature to prevent creep. They would rather have the forced transition to ATSC3 than for things to creep and people to complain about extension support. They probably figured things would move on (and they did from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 to AVC to HEVC) and that it would be better at some point so draw a line.
This seems to mean that you need an internet connectuon for the TV to work. The internet is comming to be regarded in the same was as electricity and water, an essential domestice service provision.
If you have to have internet and a screen, the bit you don't need is a tuner. So TV is doomed. Once the older generation find their TV does not work, they will learn how to use IP TV.
This "Old people can't do internet/PCs" is twaddle. Computers May have been young people's stuff once upon a time. The internet is now 35 years old. So people who were adult when it started are now over 55. My mum was a computer programmer in her 40's, and is now 91.
"Stupid people need help" is definitely the case, nothing new there, and "Samsung keep updating the Smart TV UI, and now we can't find Youtube" is also a problem - easily solved by not buying Samsung again.
People will soon realise a new TV is NOT the answer they are looking for.
"People will soon realise a new TV is NOT the answer they are looking for."
Wanna bet? People still want turnkey solutions? Turn it on, punch a number, watch. End of. Unless you can do simpler (and to do that, you'd have to go psychic), that interface is still going to be the choice of people who insist on KISS.
"Except we all know that if the ads aren't let through then we won't get to see what comes over the air. Technogeeks might be able to get around it but it will soon become the usual game of cat and mouse."
Bet you the decryption key will be buried within the actual data stream of the ad, probably in various pieces with the key piece only at the very end, meaning the ONLY way you'll be able to watch your content is by seeing the ad through to the end. Then, the content itself will slip key plot points right at the beginning, so you'll need to be paying attention from the point the ad ends or you miss most of the plot.
@ John Smith 19
If cable companies love this so does he.
Looks like he's keeping his head down at the moment...
(Caution - link to external content - wired.com!)
https://www.wired.com/story/fcc-chair-ajit-pais-silence-on-trump-tweets-speaks-volumes
or stuck up somewhere in Washington or New York
Since the switch to the ATSC standard and digital TV in the US and in Canada, the range of the OTA signal is significantly less and also the picture is either perfect or blocky at times . I wonder if the new ATSC 3 standard will improve this? I doubt it. I've gone to streaming and find it to be fine with a Roku. I can subscribe to the channels I want and can get local news. Cable is outrageously expensive. I would rather have free OTA tv but living in a rural area, there is no signal. So no new TVs here. Digital TV isn't all it was meant to be.
Since the switch to the ATSC standard and digital TV in the US and in Canada, the range of the OTA signal is significantly less and also the picture is either perfect or blocky at times
That's odd, because one of the arguments for choosing 8VSB in the first place over the COFDM that everyone else uses was that it (apparently) works better in the fringe reception areas. One selling point was that you could get the same coverage as with analogue but using 25% of the transmitter power.
One problem is that the single-station nature of the US market means fewer actual transmitters. Most of the rest of the world is replete with smaller repeater or fill-in transmitters, and one of the reasons this works is because the cost is shared.
I have no idea if this will work, but (Google Streetview) this (at the back of the car park) is a tiny repeater station serving no more than a hundred houses at Van Terrace.
In the UK Freeview (terrestrial) and Freesat (satellite) are utterly subscription-free (unless you count needing a TV licence in the first place) and where Freeview doesn't cover, Freesat does for the price of a 40cm or 60cm dish and a receiver. Some TVs have both DVB-T (Freeview) and DVB-S (Freesat) receivers built-in. Subscription services are available if you're that way inclined (sport and movies, mainly).
Apart from the waste-of-space low-bitrate "+1" channels, digital TV is working pretty well here.
M.
The new (since ATSC switchover) definition of "fringe area" is apparently "50 km from city center". Yes, I can get OTA from over 200km, often, but only in some directions, and lost quite a few local stations at the switchover. Who could have guessed that hills could attenuate signal?
I also have to wonder if the new-new standard will fix the often horrendous skew between video and audio. I first noticed it on an analog TV, during the dual-standard period. Figured out that while the local-transmitter -> TV path was analog, the networks had taken to digital transmission from network to local station. I am still baffled why, 90(?) years after Western Electric introduced sound-on-film, the boffins at Digital R' Us can't keep sound within a few seconds of picture. Some films seem to have been badly dubbed from English to English (Both cable-QAM and OTA, BTW, so it's presumably a problem in constructing the stream)
"Better Compression" will also presumably mean more situations where a line across the screen and a tick of sound (analog) gets turned into muted audio and a picture in the witness protection progam for several seconds (at a crucial plot-point, of course) .
Yeah, I'm old. Old enough to remember when CATV was becoming a thing, and political battles about actual communities versus private industry featured arguments about how the private path would lead to vast amounts of quality programming and no commercials, at a nominal fee. How's that working out?
> The new (since ATSC switchover) definition of "fringe area" is apparently "50 km from city center".
Who would have guessed that switching from mostly VHF frequencies to mostly UHF frequencies would have had an impact on signal range?
My grandparents used to be able to pick up six analog VHF stations from over 125Km away. After the switch, it dropped to only two VHF-Hi stations (11 & 13), and only intermittently. Not a single UHF station made it that far.
Since the switch to the ATSC standard and digital TV in the US and in Canada, the range of the OTA signal is significantly less and also the picture is either perfect or blocky at times .
<rant>
One thing to realise about TV in Canada (and possibly the US) is that the objective of the broadcaster is not always to provide OTA reception. Putting up a transmitter gets you on "basic cable" in that area even if the reception is crap. Hence here in Ottawa some transmitters are in cheap rather than good locations and, since the transmitters aren't all co-located, you need an antenna rotator and a tower if you want to get all the OTA stations.
</rant>
Fortunately there is the internet.... although the speed sucks in rural areas.
What'd so obsolete about it? It's not like you can measure things in degrees Celsius that you can't in degrees Farenheit. If you wanted to get REALLY serious, you should be pushing for Kevin stead.
After all, Brits are still using miles, stone, and Roman rail gauges. If they can't go all-in, why should we?
I do not think it is cable companies that want this so much.
It is OTA broadcasters that want to compete with cable companies.
The USofA was one of the first nations to finalize digital broadcast television standards, so they used some fairly ancient technology specifications to do so. Those nations that converted much later got to use much more efficient and advanced standards.
180 million households in the USofA sometime after 2021. $100 coupon per box. 5 boxes per household. Add in an equal amount of administrative overhead. $1000 per household. $180 billion dollars. Where are we going to get that? Reduction to two boxes per household? Still $72 billion dollars.
... to hold on to their model of locked-in viewers ad content.
It won't take long before people realise you can get any TV once and plug in a PC in a set-top form-factor to get all the TV you want with no more forced upgrades, artificial limitations or ridiculous charges to achieve the same quality people on the internet get for free.
Steps to implement on my ancient plasma TV:
1. Cancel AT&T U-verse (yes, I'm one of the holdouts who actually like it**)
2. Sign up for high(er)-speed DSL service on the SAME LINE. See, I only have a choice for home internet between AT&T (twisted pair) and Comcast (coax). Had Comcast once; not going back for ANY reason. Pretty sure either company will make me pay dearly for internet-only service, given what I'm paying now as PART of the U-verse.
3. Sign up for various streams: Netflix, Hulu.
4. Oh, and buy an antenna for the TV -- never needed one since I got it; had U-verse since April 2008.
So, maybe I'd break even on the monthly costs, and maybe I won't. I figure it works now, so why "fix" it? If I do it later and need a new TV/display due to ATSC 3.0, GOOD -- I can retire the old plasma!
** The neighborhood wiring is from 1993-94 and in poor shape. The techs have been improving the junctions at various neighbors' houses between me and the main digital head-node, but when they do -- including when houses sell and new neighbors move in and AT&T comes out for new service -- my line goes full-dark for a few hours. Wouldn't be so bad if the DVR would still play independently, but alas. And the equipment mysteriously degrades over time: I've gone through 3-4 DVRs and 4-5 modems/gateways/Wi-Fi & Ethernet hubs. But overall it works, and actually getting better.
(In that same timeframe, I've had only ONE tiny Vonage VoIP box. There was a second, prior unit which suffered a lightning spike that passed THROUGH Comcast's modem/Ethernet hub without affecting the hub but frying the Vonage box AND my old laptop's Ethernet port.)
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