Bye bye, old-style TV.

[Sibling DavidH]

We have just said goodbye to analogue television.  It's being phased out here in favour of digital and for a couple of years we've been replacing our old CRT tellies with nice slim LCD sets with digital built in.  Happily I've got the sets for the lounge, breakfast room and kitchen from the same maker, so the decoding delay is the same on each and I can carry on piping quality sound round on the Hi-Fi without a delay of two seconds or more between the two formats.  It's more expensive to buy new tellies rather than adding digital decoder boxes which you can get for under £20, but far neater.

In our area the analogue system will finally be switched off some time in April, but we've decided to finally go over now.  It's sad.  TV began here with a BBC channel before the war.  I remember the old 405-line system, positive modulation making the picture even spottier than need be, given the 50-mile distance from the transmitter.  The BBC went out on 50 MHz, so we had H-shaped aerials 10 feet high.  Then came the ITV (independent) on 200 MHz so we had two channels, even if the rooftop did look like a modern art display.  Gradually we got more and more hours broadcast per day.  Then in the 60s we got a third channel - BBC2 - on the 4-800 Mhz band which meant three aerials on the pole.  Finally, BBC1 and ITV also went over to the new band and the massive aerials could go.  In the end we got 5 channels on that system.

This was on PAL: 625-line, negative modulation, FM sound and bags of bandwidth for Teletext signals and colour, which we got in the late 60s.  It has stayed the same system until now, and was supposed to be standardised across Europe, though in  practice it wasn't quite.  The French had to be different and came out with SECAM (Suprème Effort Contre Les Américains).  Also the Germans had a different separation between sound and vision, so with a German TV you could have one or the other but not both.

Now we get dozens of channels on the Freeview service, few of which we ever watch.  We are not interested in Freesat or the paid services, so all we end up with is the same number of TV sets as before, though prettier, and the extra channels which we'll watch once or twice a week. The government has grabbed a bit of bandwidth to sell off, and the Pacific rim countries have sold us squillions of new tellies.  I'm really sad the old familiar system has gone, but that's because I'm a grumpy old git!

[Swatopluk]

Since I can do without TV (we don't have a set), that's not the problem. But the end of analogue radio will be. The only radio we have that I know is digitally capable is not actually new and the standard has, as I read a few days ago in the papers, changed since then. So it would mean to replace all hardware.

[Sibling DavidH]

Yes, that's coming here too in 2015, if we can't fight it off.  In the UK, the digital signal is actually inferior to the VHF FM analogue, because the idiots chose too low a bit-rate¹.  The whole thing will be a total pain in the bum, the government will get a tiddly bit of the 100MHz band to sell off and again other countries' industries will cash in.  And we'll have no accurate radio pips to set our watches by.

This one really does have no advantages at all and many drawbacks.  What about all the car radios?  What about my newish high-quality FM tuner-Amp?  

1 Yes, Germany changed system to a better codec whereas we've stuck with ours.

[Aggie]

Digital radio?

I haven't heard of it here.  I wonder if it's due to the distances involved in broadcasting? 

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I knew about the local NPR station but it turns out there is quite a bit of stations already in the air in the area. My car radio isn't capable for that though...

[Aggie]

There's cable radio that might be digital here (thru the TV coax), but as a broadcast I haven't heard of it.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Apparently they shot down the attempt to implement it in June last year:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_using_DAB/DMB#Canada

[Aggie]

Well, there you go. 

Canadians are notoriously slow adopters of new technology; we tend to see little point in replacing consumer goods if the old equipment still works.  It's changing a bit over the last decade or so, but considering radio is primarily consumed behind the wheel, stubbornly AM-only over the majority of the geographical area (if not by population*) and there are plenty of 20-to-30 year-old cars on the road, I'm not surprised that digital radio had a tough go.

_{*I may be biased because I'm in the West, with lower population density, but I expect small-town/northern Ontario and Quebec likewise have a dearth of radio. Many places I work have no radio coverage whatsoever.}

About four-fifths of Canada's population lives within 150 kilometres (93 mi) of the United States border.[170] A similar proportion live in urban areas concentrated in the Quebec City – Windsor Corridor (notably the Greater Golden Horseshoe, including Toronto and area, Montreal, and Ottawa), the BC Lower Mainland (consisting of the region surrounding Vancouver), and the Calgary–Edmonton Corridor in Alberta.

If I'm correct in thinking that DAB has a smaller coverage area per transmitter, it'd be foolish to use it outside of urban areas in Canada.  Out in the countryside, channel density is not a factor and coverage distance is king (and it's inevitably country music, btw). 

TV is less of an issue, because many rural TV viewers have switched over to satellite, I think.

[Sibling DavidH]

Canadians are notoriously slow adopters of new technology; we tend to see little point in replacing consumer goods if the old equipment still works.

I wish it were the same here, but there are too many opportunities to make money.  With the TV it makes sense, with analogue channels being 8MHz wide and real demand for new stations.  But the radio?   

[Griffin NoName]

They don''t switch off analogue in London until 2012, we are the last to go I think. I have one digitial TV and one analogue TV with a digi box. I don't watch analogue at all any more.

[Opsa]

Analogue TV is gone here in the United States. A lot of people I know just used the switch-over as a decision not to have TV at all any more.

I would miss my car radio, though, if they made it obsolete.

[Sibling DavidH]

I don't watch analogue at all any more.

We won't, now that we've finally got the three downstairs TVs with the sound all in sync.

A lot of people I know just used the switch-over as a decision not to have TV at all any more.

Here in the UK that's legally possible, but the few people I know who have no TV get pestered repeatedly by the BBC to pay their license.  They seemingly won't accept that you don't have a set, and never let go.  It sometimes amounts more or less to harassment.  If you turn on a TV you must have a BBC licence, even if you never watch the BBC.

[Swatopluk]

The German GEZ (Gebühreneinzugszentrale = fee collection central) is worse. It's not just 'more or less' harassment. The only thing missing are armed thugs (the ones they use seem not to be packing (yet)). But now they have achieved what looks like final victory. It will be a fee per household soon that does not differentiate between different kind of media. That after they failed to have each and every PC declared a TV (even if it included no soundcard etc.).

[Sibling DavidH]

The license people occasionally used to raid the halls of residence at #2 daughter's medical school.  Students would rush round alerting the others and everyone would be hiding their TVs.  My daughter had an early b/w laptop with a TV card and they never even glanced at it.  This was 1996-7, when such things were rare.

[Aggie]

Very strange, from a North-of-American perspective. Do you need to take a test to get a TV licence?