Analog TV says goodnight
By Steven Kim 
posted Jul 14th 2009 5:05PM
posted Jul 14th 2009 5:05PM
Did you catch the sound of a falling tree in an empty woods this past weekend? In case you didn't hear it, analog "nightlight" transmissions went dark Sunday -- which amounted to 121 stations in 87 markets signing off for the last time. Absent the nightlight info screens, rock-dwellers will now have to emerge from their hermitages to figure out what happened to their TVs, but as we say in the 21st century, "them's the breaks." Aside from areas being served by analog translator and/or low power service, this marks the end of the analog broadcast TV era. Way to go, America -- we haven't heard any reports of riots or mass hysteria, and we'd dare say the citizenry handled this tech transition better than the millenium bug.
Regular digital TV is so last month.
When is the 4K 3D TV switch coming?
I like to see the TV execs' faces when they get the notice to switch all their cameras again.
4K 3D can't go over digital tv?
Of course, it can.
I'm talking about the cameras TV broadcasters use ... which was expensive for the switch. They use 1080i or 720p cameras, both of which really aren't that great.
Next year, we'll be getting 4K TVs ... and 3D won't be far behind, so TV broadcast will have to make that 4K switch eventually (3D hopefully will just be an add-on to those cameras).
Professional sports demand it.
Why do we need a 4k res when the biggest TV the mass consumers use is 42". Unless you have a >100" screen then you can tell the difference. It's like asking "Let's have all the movies in IMAX".
Does 1080i or 720p look just like real life yet? Then we haven't achieved the best resolution.
4K is not just more pixels, but greater depth of field, better color.
TVs will also simply not just be a TV.
4K TVs will be better for gaming. Just like on computer monitors. Gamers want higher and higher resolutions. Imagine Telepresence with family members. Imagine a live video feed of Paris, Hawaii, etc.
But for TV broadcast, imagine watching a football game in 4K, you can pause, zoom into any part of the field and see it crisp and clear. We'll know for sure if the ball was out or not. Same with nature programs, we can see any part of a rain forest shot, for example. If there is a parrot in the distance, we could zoom in and see the detail in it's feathers. For news, imagine if we had 4K cameras when JFK was shot.
We will eventually have our TVs on all of our walls. The TV material will be embedded in paint. Think at the beginning of Total Recall. It's not as far off as people think. We'll watch sports and nature shows on a whole wall.
Having 4K now is kinda ridiculous, but in less than ten years, it'll be a standard.
miko, the standards for DTV, including HDTV, were in development in the early 1980s. It took them twenty-five years to go from drawing board to where we are now. Before that, it had taken much the same period of time for the previous major change to broadcast standards (color TV) to become common.
Even if the FCC were anxious to begin again with the next phase tomorrow -- which I assure you they are not -- you're crazy if you think there's a chance in hell of seeing a new broadcast standard become reality in TWO decades, let alone one.
No, we're going to be watching 720p/1080i broadcasts for a very long time to come.
I didn't mean that the 4K standard would be with TV over air broadcasts in ten years, but people should have 4K sets in their homes by then. Since they are releasing them next year for the high price tag, in ten years time they will come down a lot in price.
This probably won't have anything to do with the FCC anyway since this probably won't be a switch via airwaves. They'll be using other ways for getting our programming (via fiber optic internet, satellite, etc.). I'm pretty sure they can shoot something in 4K and down convert to put 1080i over the air for those not wanting to pay for service. This will only happen faster with competition. If NBC decides to shoot their sports with 4K, then those sports would rather be with them than another network. The problem is how they are going to get that much information to a home when there are still people on 56K modems.
My first post was a joke, but people took it too seriously, then it went off topic on why we need 4K TVs when people are happy with their 1080p TVs and I gave them examples of what you can do with it. Heck, we might even have something totally different in ten (and a 1/2) years for broadcasting:
http://www.sonyinsider.com/2008/10/06/3d-holographic-tvs-very-possible-and-will-happen-by-2020/
And again, no, I don't think over the air broadcasts will change in ten years.
Joke or not, it's an interesting assertion. Unfortunately, Andy is correct though: the forces which put HDTV in your living room were mostly not technical - the surrounding business, infrastructure and political systems are far more complex than the technology itself, and ultimately these will set the date at which you have higher definition multi-angle content streaming into your home.
Happy also makes a good point. Regardless of what the technology does, people's living rooms aren't likely to get much bigger. If the majority of people watch their movies in a 4m x 4m living room, they don't have much call for a 100 inch TV. Of course, there are still an awfully long way to go with small displays, but the call for higher resolution will eventually peter out (as it is doing with consumer camera resolution)
It took around sixty years to go from 480i being the standard to 720p and 1080i being the standards, and part of what made 720p/1080i the new standards was simply that the television industry said, in the mid eighties, that that was what they wanted to transition to.
And, despite the article's headline's implication, it's far from clear we have "transitioned" in the sense that most televisions are suddenly digital HDTVs. In fact, most televisions in use are NTSC TVs hooked up either to an analog cable source or a digital STB, so most people are still watching TV using 60 year old television standards.
At this point, there's no activity by the ITU on 4k.
Will it happen? Perhaps, but the introduction of high end televisions within the next few years, if they happen at all, isn't going to make a difference. There's no bandwidth in ATSC for the switch. There's no TV decoding equipment in common use capable of decoding such a high resolution signal. The TV companies are still in the process of replacing their 480i equipment with 720p and 1080i stuff. And there's no good reason to believe there's any demand for this, not while 50" remains a practical cut-off point for the maximum size of a television in a large room, and 25" remains a practical cut-off point for a TV in a bedroom, etc.
Remember that on the majority of high definition televisions out there at the moment, from a normal viewing angle and distance, there's only a small difference between DVD and the high definition formats. It's small enough that many people can't see it.
The upgrade to HD was worth it. Virtually everyone with an HDTV can see a benefit. ATSC HD looks gorgeous, we now have widescreen (not as wide as many of us hoped, but it's still good), and we also now have decent audio, for the first time in television history. It's far from clear that a 4K upgrade would offer the same improvement over HD that HD was over NTSC. Indeed, it's far from clear a 4K upgrade would offer the same improvement over HD that DVD (ED) is over NTSC.
Now we just need to transition
the full powers that can not afford the transition
the low powers
the translators/repeaters
analogue cable
Like was said, there's no way to do 3D 4K over the air, and likely never will be. You'd be looking at taking up eight or so channels just to get the bitrate needed for that much data.
Well, in a few years there's probably gonna be a new video compression codec comes out that's more efficient than H.264.
threedee, there already are, they are called wavelet codecs, and they are not only more efficient, but can also be downscaled without a full decode. Means your 4k feed can be seen at 1080p, 720p, 480p, and even cell phone sized without needing to decode any more than your screen handles. Still in infancy though, and only the newer RED cameras currently use some form of it.
Then it is too bad the US DTV standard is Mpeg2.
Even we we are ahead, we like to be behind.
basroll - wavelet codecs are still in the "being tinkered with" stage. They do prove to be very effective at high bitrates (Pixlet is an example), but when attempts have been make pixlet based codecs optimal at (DVD/ATSC/Blu-ray) type bitrates, the quality thus far hasn't been as good as H.264.
Take a look at Dirac, which is where a lot of the effort is going at the moment to create a low and medium bitrate wavelet codec. Thus far, real world tests suggest it's about 20% less efficient.
This'll improve in time, but we're nowhere near seeing any codec, wavelet or otherwise, be a major improvement on H.264.
Clearly we owe this all to President Obama
Actually President Bush was the one who signed the DTV transition into law.
ever heard of sarcasm?
</sarcasm> forgot to escape code
Turn the digital bit rates way up. I still get Canadian analog waves.
{pet peeve}
2000 was not the start of the millennium. 2001 was.
It was not a "bug" because the saving of the two digits was intentional in order to save on what was very precious storage space back in the 1960s and 1970s. It cannot be intentional *and* be a bug.
{/pet peeve}
There's a spanish channel in South Florida, channel 21 (genTV), who is still broadcasting analog TV full time. It doesn't even have a digital channel. What gives?
Maybe they didn't get the memo. :(
/sarcasm on
Isn't florida a mexican/cuban state?!?!
/sarcasm off
They got the memo, but it was in english.
If you're refering to WDLP-CA (a genTV repeater), it's a Class A TV station - which is a low power station which enjoys a certain amount of protection from the signals of stronger stations.
Low power stations (-LP and -CA, as well as translators) are exempt from the DTV mandate, and most localities have one or two that are still broadcasting. Our MyNetworkTV affiliate, WTCN, is still in analog (though it is being simulcast on WTVX's multiplex as DT3 so those of us who are ATSC-only can still get it.) Interesting, many rural areas rely upon translators to get any TV signals at all, meaning that there are presumably one or two areas with two or three significant networks still on the air.
NTSC isn't dead yet, just on it's last legs.
Finally, all things analog and viewable are now digital and digital.