You'll need a digital converter box very soon...

it is all for the better of society that we are more technologically adapt

 

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I concur.

However, the introduction of new technology (to the exclusion of predecessant technology) does not necessarily imply the requisite 'adeptness'.....

 

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Ok.
So. Outside of the US of A the opposite of the phrase "using an antenna" is "using a digital ready television"?

If you say so.
I just thought I'd clear up a misconception you seemed to have. But, apparently it was I who was laboring under misconception.
Europe (or whatever you meant by "outside of the US of A") has skipped the cable-ready segment of broadcast standards and thus the only people to be really affected by the upcoming shift to a digital standard (whenever that might be outside of the US of A, since this thread is about US standards) are those people who are watching network television.

Interesting.

 

No prob.

It is pretty much as you say (here in Canada at least...)
Beyond antennae (where, at best, you would receive the local station, and a few of the national government broadcast stations) one realistically has to use a digital-read setup.

I think part of the confusion here is the odd (relatively..) usage of the term "cable". In the US (it appears to me..) 'cable' refers to specific subscriber broadcasts channels, whereas in Canada, 'cable' refers specifically to the medium of distribution. So, for example, in the US, one has to subscribe to the cable channel "HBO". whereas in Canada, one simply opts to subscribe to the local distributor of HBO programming (usually Showcase), whether it be via cable medium or digital distribution....

 

Actually, cable refers to the medium. It comes into your house through a coaxial cable rather than a network broadcast received through an aerial.

However, the content distributed via cable is, at present, split into two basic groups (relevant to the present discussion), analog cable (which generally consists of channels 2 through 100 something. This type of broadcast is decipherable by most televisions in use today although there are still some ancient crones out there that require set top boxes of some type (a vcr for example) to switch channels outside the range of the television. Old style tv's only operate with 2-13 with the UHF range being practically worthless outside of network broadcasting.

There is also digital cable which has all those analog channels, plus several hundreds of digital channels above that. Very few televisions are digital ready in my experience. It's surprising that it'd be different in Canada, but apparently it is. Perhaps they went through the digital shift already and thus the technology has already made the change.

I do know that when shopping for tv tuner cards last year, I still didn't see any digital tuner cards for sale. I think they are slowly becoming available now though. Still expensive though.

 

Ahhh.
So it was just a nomenclature misunderstanding then.
That pretty much describes the situation here. With the exception that, it would be difficult to find a TV for sale that wasn't digital-ready.
The big move now (as far as TV sales goes..) is in 1080p/HD ready sets. Again, it would be difficult to head into your local retailer and find a set that didn't qualify as HD ready.

 

That might well be the case here as well. Haven't bought a tv in ages, so wouldn't be surprised if most new sets (if not all) are digital ready. However, the vast majority of sets in use are not. Hence the problem.

 

Right.
Thus, the jury-rigging of the entire techno-economic-situation.
Yes, the same goes on here. They just usually hit us with the hype pretty early on, compared to the States that is. I say this simply because I live within a 15 minute drive of the US, so, we often get a lot of US advertising via paper and Radio/TV broadcast, and it's funny how you never really hear about certain tech. news through these US media until literally moths after we've already been hit hard. Makes me think the big corporate bodies are using us as a sort of 'first-run ' demographic....

 

Title: Will somebody leave the standards set one way for a while, and stop flipping them around, like some child playing with a light switch?

Many people already have digital reception TVs, by now, in their living room. But what of the other 3 TVs throughout the rest of the house? And what of all these old people in nursing homes, who don't keep up with these technological developments? Isn't somebody going to be hopping mad, when the government just flips the switch, and trashes countless millions of TV sets? Why can't they do this "transition" thing, a lot longer. Why all these mandates? And if the government can mandate, why don't the government set some standards and end this stupid format war between HD-DVD and Bluray? Or the 2 noncompatible, pay-for-what-ought-to-be-free satelite radio standards? BTW, I only have but 1 working TV, so I am HD/SD digital-ready in this. But I was all set to just quit watching TV, come 2009, had my old TV still worked, making possible skipping out on upgrading. I probably paid double, to make sure I had the new technology, hopefully to last the next 19 years, like my first TV did. And I was glad I could actually get it, in FULL-SCREEN.

Another question: Why does my TV allow me to set, 3 types of cable? And what does the built-in QAM tuner mean? I have no cable-card slot, so does that mean that my TV is only analog-cable ready? Doesn't QAM mean digital cable? I've heard conflicting claims?

Now I hear radio ads hyping HD radio. To which I say, "I am not about to go out and buy something new, everytime they want to change the standards." (Seems like almost every couple of years, they want to introduce new standards, just to get us to junk our old still-working stuff, to go buy new stuff. But I wasn't designed just to be a corporate profit pawn.) FM actually, is pretty good, unless a signal is very weak, it's pretty accurate at maintaining the audio signal, unlike so much of analog. Far better than AM does. Yeah, I like free digital, but that makes sense to me, pretty much only when I am in the market to buy a new radio. But don't most people already have plenty of radios?

 

Title: Yet another reason to consider giving up wasting time watching a TV?

Perhaps, but why should I have to pay for what other people want to change, when I don't get paid that much after taxes, from my crummy cheap employer, to pay all these rising insurance costs, price-gouged gasoline, price-gouged natural gas to keep my home warm, and ever rising socialist/communist taxation schemes?

 

It's very popular in the UK, there are free to air digital channels broadcast over the regular TV mast system. You just plug in a converter box, and get loads more channels, plus digital radio stations too;

http://www.freeview.co.uk/home

'BBC News 24', and 'Film 4' make it worth buying the box alone.

Well, now you may start to see more switch back, when the digital signal starts coming at you for free over the airwaves. Depending on the availability of course.

 

all get that you have to pay for what was once free, ja?

 

gotta keep the plebs dumb as shit after all...