My situation: brick apartment building, no outdoor antennas allowed, only exposure is from south-facing windows. With an indoor antenna, channel scan brings in WTNH New Haven and its subchannels and nothing else. All the other TV transmitters are to the north and west between 20 and 30 miles away. There must be a significant number of people in this country in similar situations, and I'm sure the FCC and the broadcasters knew exactly what would happen when the digital switch was pulled. OTA has become an afterthought, even with the subchannels, and I don't think the television industry is one bit concerned.
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Come on FCC roll back the children television rules already
- Thread starter KJBlast2011
- Start date
My situation: brick apartment building, no outdoor antennas allowed, only exposure is from south-facing windows. With an indoor antenna, channel scan brings in WTNH New Haven and its subchannels and nothing else. All the other TV transmitters are to the north and west between 20 and 30 miles away. There must be a significant number of people in this country in similar situations, and I'm sure the FCC and the broadcasters knew exactly what would happen when the digital switch was pulled. OTA has become an afterthought, even with the subchannels, and I don't think the television industry is one bit concerned.
Honestly, virtually no “industry” can account for every possible scenario, nor be constrained because of such outliers.
There is no difference in reception of the x.1 channel and any additional subchannels as they are all components of the same overall datastream. The x.1 usually is allotted more bandwidth but if you get one of the channels on the signal, you will get them all. It’s not like FM where the HD is a separate signal from the main analog channel.
One thing to watch out for: Many TV stations (particularly LPTVs) tend to be very sloppy about engineering, resulting in some really crappy video and audio quality on program streams. A downside of too much reliance on automation, where nobody is paying attention to what is actually being transmitted.
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I'm sure that's the way it's supposed to work. It hasn't always been true in my experience.
OK, here are the new rules:
https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/fcc-gives-broadcasters-more-kidvid-flexibility
https://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/fcc-gives-broadcasters-more-kidvid-flexibility
OTA is an afterthought, but one that is required by the FCC for a broadcast station to exist. It's used to feed translators and those cable/satellite/online systems that don't have a direct fiber connection. Viewing via antenna is not all that important to them. Despite recent broadcast industry PSAs bleating otherwise, OTA is freeloading to them (Some broadcasters have said so in the past. Meredith comes to mind immediately).
If it weren't for the subscriber fees they get, I'm willing to bet that more than half of today's stations would have to go off the air. The rest, other than the network O&Os and maybe a few other big-market stations, would have to cut back their local programming to just a couple of newscasts per day, just like the good old days. The smaller markets would be back to between 2 and 4 stations each. The advertiser-only business model seems to be no longer viable.
By definition, if you receive channels x.1, x.2, x.3, etc., you are receiving the exact same signal regardless of which of those channels you select, assuming they're coming from the same physical transmitter (there are exceptions to that, Fox 10 Phoenix being one). If some of them are messed up, it's probably an issue with the station's encoding, not the signal.
I'm a Democrat, but Chairman Pai is absolutely correct. Kids aren't using TV the way pre-millennials did. The sort of content E/I provides is available and being consumed, in much more interesting and often interactive form, online. The kids in OTA-only households will still have access to all E/I programming, whether on main channels or subchannels.
Given the small amount of pre-conversion testing and the low power levels afterward I would opine that the broadcast industry did everything they could to drop as many OTA viewers as possible. UHF propagation was well known but it became even worse with digital. It was only in the case of those stations whose post conversion VHF signal was so poor that they brought up a secondary UHF signal (ala KSAZ in Phoenix) that any effort was made to retain their OTA viewers. My reception/reliability in the 1950's was much better than it is today and that speaks volumes. It is much easier for me to download or Youtube, commercial free, those few TV shows my family watches rather than try to fill the couch at the prescribed hour. The TV suits are cutting their own throats.
An anecdotal account for sure but my kids (ranging in age from 42-29) and one granddaughter (age 8) do not watch any broadcast TV. They use their TV sets (or mine) for streaming, games and videos. My wife cannot stand commercials so she watches only those shows that I download (commercial free of course). I have gotten to where I watch only live sports (the NHL and as with the recent Women's World Cup soccer tournament - very limited commercials).
Given that, then why the requirement at all? E/I isn't required for any non-broadcast media, and that's where the kids are going. Why continue a charade? I suspect the answer is: Because they can.
I suspect one liberal argument would be that having this content on OTA TV ensures that even very poor children (who in this country are disproportionately minority) have access to some sort of educational programming, as they live in households too poor to afford internet access or cable TV,. The question, of course, is with all the other non-educational content on OTA TV, are significant numbers of them actually watching any E/I at all? But who knows? Maybe there's a generation of future veterinarians and botanists out there who'll look back someday and say that it was an E/I show about elephants or dandelions they saw as children that helped start them toward their future careers and away from petty crime and drugs. Yes, yes, and I just saw a pig fly by.
It is a charade, as you say, and it baffles me why the FCC is continuing it, It's probably not helping any great number of citizens, nor is there any political capital to be made by forcing TV stations to carry it.
The whole licensing thing is a charade. They should just sell the frequencies as they do with spectrum space to telecom.
They should go back to the 1960's 70's rules.Nevermind TV /Radio ownership rules which is another whole topic...
In a digital world .Good question today is how many kids are sitting in front of the TV these days...
Its not like in the 1960's and 70's which is my generation and a very slim choice of channels before cable TV came out...
In a digital world .Good question today is how many kids are sitting in front of the TV these days...
Its not like in the 1960's and 70's which is my generation and a very slim choice of channels before cable TV came out...
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The minute gas sells for 30 cents is when we go back to 60s 70s rules. You can't put toothpaste back in the tube.
I agree 100 percent.Gas now here at $2.60.
You might be interested to know that 35 cents (which was about the average price of a U.S. gallon of regular in mid-1966 California) would be about $2.77 today. So, except for the significant increase in gas taxes (both CA and elsewhere) gas is about the same price as it has been for decades inflation adjusted.
And a good chunk of the popular content on those platforms is licensed elsewhere--including cable networks.
Not sure if that's statistically correct. To get Netflix or YouTube TV, you need a paid subscription.
Once again, the FCC doesn't regulate Netflix or YouTube, so these regulations don't apply.
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