Metroliner telephone article 4073

Totally agreed -- the number of channels today is ridiculous. Even with the duplication here (Dallas and FtWorth have one station per network each due to range problems), plus the doubling due to parallel NTSC and ATSC, plus standard channel spacing, we have nowhere near enough stations on the air to justify the number of channels available. The new LPTV licenses may change that, though.

... which is what most consumers seem to be doing, driving the FCC nuts.

buttuming you're able to use an outdoor antenna. Many folks live in apartments-condos or have onerous HOA rules against antennae.

I've got an amplified indoor antenna and I can barely pick up the VHF NTSC stations 10mi away (bad ghosting, colors off, etc); UHF NTSC is totally snow. I can pick up the one VHF ATSC station perfectly most of the day and the UHF ATSC stations occasionally -- and they're at 1-5% of the power output of the NTSC stations.

Sports is the big win; the clarity of ATSC beats the pants off NTSC even on a standard non-HD set. Getting rid of interlacing is also a big win for those programs that are 480p instead of 480i. And, of course, big-budget stuff that's in 720p or 1080i blows NTSC away.

I love watching Univision and Telemundo (when I can get them); even if I didn't speak Spanish it'd be worth it anyways. It amazes me that nearly every show has the women in skimpy spandex outfits while the men are walking around in suits, and everyone acts like it's perfectly normal...

But that's more work than 99% of people are willing to put into OTA; if they had the money for all the stuff you need to make NTSC work well, they'd put it into cable or satellite instead and get 100 times the channels (not that there's really more to watch, though...)

I haven't seen a side-by-side comparison either; I know NTSC kills SECAM handily (though that says more about SECAM than NTSC), but I've never seen a PAL set.

I've never seen blocking on NTSC except when it's happening in the studio. A lot of programs are distributed digitally now, and downconverted to NTSC for OTA broadcast. This actually started before ATSC went live, because the stations needed to go to MPEG-2 to play nice with the cable and satellite operators (not to mention cheaper distribution vs. C-band).

If we'd waited another ten years, there'd still be some new technology around the corner.

However, ATSC is pretty bad technically even for the state of the art. VSB-8 is nowhere near as good as OFDM, particularly if you need to cover a large area. The lack of modularity for the codec is a loser too, as MPEG-4 is already killing MPEG-2 off and the compressors aren't even mature yet.

If I were in the consumer electronics biz, I'd have removed the tuner years ago, maybe including a cheap OTA STB in the box. They're just wasted space in the TV. DVI and-or component inputs are all you need these days. And, by going with STBs, you could "upgrade" the broadcast system with new features more easily down the road as ATSC aged.

S

-- Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking

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