What is Glynn Walden smoking?

[audioguy]

Regrettably, I think over the air television broadcasting is a technology of the past that is coming to an end. I am the last person anywhere within a 6 block radius with a rooftop antenna, and none of my neighbors watches OTA TV. For them, that is in the same category as typewriters, dictaphones, tape recorders, and VCRs. Television really does not have to be wireless. You're not carrying that 50" plasma around, are you? And 8-VSB DTV is not the technology that is going to be used for broadcasting to smartphones and tablets-- more likely it will be a flavor of LTE that enables multicasting. And that will happen in the wireless carrier bands, not the TV broadcast band.

I think radio needs these two channels (5 and 6) more than TV does. In case you forgot, most DTV broadcasters have been very unsuccessful with VHF propagation. They were leaving the VHF band like rats fleeing a sinking ship until the FCC shut off the faucet.

You could fit every AM station in a market in two TV channels. TV has more channels than it knows what to do with right now. Consider what they are filling up those "-X" SD channels with-- stuff that isn't making any money for the most part. Stations that want to remain on the air can share a channel for the few viewers out there still watching on rabbit ears. You could put 6 SD channels on one RF channel.

Radio is inherently mobile, and television is rarely mobile. Think about it.

 

[davideduardo]

Regrettably, I think over the air television broadcasting is a technology of the past that is coming to an end. I am the last person anywhere within a 6 block radius with a rooftop antenna, and none of my neighbors watches OTA TV. For them, that is in the same category as typewriters, dictaphones, tape recorders, and VCRs.

But for 15% of the population, OTA is the way they get TV. Among minorities, it is close to 20%.

I think radio needs these two channels (5 and 6) more than TV does.

But, with OTA still serving a significant percentage of the population, the bandwidth is not going to be given up in the next 5 years or so.

By then, the majority of successful AMs will have migrated to FM in one way or another. That will leave the band much as it is in Canada... a place for niche formats in major markets.

You could fit every AM station in a market in two TV channels.

It's really unlikely that enough new-band receivers of any kind would be available for those AMs to make a go of it.

 

[Carmine5]

Sorry, but if any service is destined for the scrap heap it would be broadcast radio. It might have dragged on a little longer with HD Radio but most broadcasters and consumers have said no to the technology. By contrast, consider what has happened with broadcast TV in terms of innovation over the last decade: DTV, HD, mobile DTV, 3D, multicasting, 4K, HEVC, auxiliary data services and the list goes on. Broadcast radio? A failed attempt at providing digital audio. Instead, listeners have embraced internet radio and the numbers for that service have gone through the roof. No need for ch. 5 & 6 for web radio.

As for the number of OTA TV viewers, approximately 18% of US households watch TV using an antenna and that number is expected to grow particularly among the 18-34 demographic. By contrast, less than 9% of that same demo listen to AM radio and that number is expected to fall.

Let's face it, the only reason for giving radio ch. 5 & 6 is so AM station owners can preserve their businesses. Well guess what? Television broadcasters want to preserve their businesses as well. And if need be, the TV broadcast industry can innovate ways to make lower VHF work effectively for DTV the same way they've been doing with the rest of the service (as it is, a CP antenna system works fairly well for transmitting DTV on lower VHF). But don't pompously tell me that broadcast TV is on the way out. It has far more future potential then broadcast radio could ever have. And as far as lower VHF ch. 5 & 6 are concerned; possession is 9/10ths of the law.

 

[audioguy]

Nah, sorry. According to a recent article in Broadcast Engineering, "Free, over-the-air television viewing of broadcast TV signals are now watched by only 9 percent of the U.S. population — down from 16 percent in 2003, according to Nielsen, the major TV and radio rating service." See: http://broadcastengineering.com/transmitters/over-air-tv-market-continues-shrink

You hang onto those rabbit ears. They might be worth something someday. In a museum.

Tell me how you're gonna get consumers to accept having fishpole antennas that are 3 feet long in their living rooms. That's from the era of "I Love Lucy".

Technologies that will solve the problem of VHF propagation? Excuse me, do you have a way of making VHF signals penetrate modern steel and concrete buildings up your sleeve?

Nobody wants VHF, especially channels 2-6. Nobody. And just like AM radio, nobody cares about OTA television. I do not know a single person in my circle of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who watches OTA TV. Nada. (Nor do they listen to AM).

 

[rbrucecarter5]

Nah, sorry. According to a recent article in Broadcast Engineering, "Free, over-the-air television viewing of broadcast TV signals are now watched by only 9 percent of the U.S. population — down from 16 percent in 2003, according to Nielsen, the major TV and radio rating service." See: http://broadcastengineering.com/transmitters/over-air-tv-market-continues-shrink

You hang onto those rabbit ears. They might be worth something someday. In a museum.

Tell me how you're gonna get consumers to accept having fishpole antennas that are 3 feet long in their living rooms. That's from the era of "I Love Lucy".

Technologies that will solve the problem of VHF propagation? Excuse me, do you have a way of making VHF signals penetrate modern steel and concrete buildings up your sleeve?

Nobody wants VHF, especially channels 2-6. Nobody. And just like AM radio, nobody cares about OTA television. I do not know a single person in my circle of friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who watches OTA TV. Nada. (Nor do they listen to AM).

I know a few fanatics that only watch over the air TV. Some are religious fanatics protesting what they perceive to be the filth on cable - when is the last time they tuned in Family Guy? Talk about bigoted filth. And it just gets worse from there on live scripted sitcoms, but I digress. The sub-channels have some variety, a little content you could get on cable. Some watch over the air for that because the cable systems don't carry it. Usually those homes have a switch of some sort allowing them to switch in antenna and out of cable. Home owners associations are like the gestapo, and one of their campaigns of terror is to eliminate all outdoor antennas from subdivisions. So many people are being forced into cable that otherwise would not want it. HOA's even add the cable dues to the association dues, so you pay for it whether you use it or not.

As for AM radio, there is a lot of listening out there. Conservative talk radio drives ratings up around here.

 

[davideduardo]

Nah, sorry. According to a recent article in Broadcast Engineering, "Free, over-the-air television viewing of broadcast TV signals are now watched by only 9 percent of the U.S. population — down from 16 percent in 2003, according to Nielsen, the major TV and radio rating service." See: http://broadcastengineering.com/transmitters/over-air-tv-market-continues-shrink

That figure was immediately contested as being self-serving to Nielsen.

There are still plenty of lower income housing units with master antenna systems... and those systems, although they get lumped into "cable" are really OTA with a distribution amplifier.

During the DTV conversion, a major Hispanic broadcaster found that about 20% of its viewers used some form of non-cable, non-satellite OTA reception.

OTA is not going away soon, whether the percentage is 10% or 15%.

10% of the US population is over 30 million people.

 

[tomservo]

I don't know anyone who is OTA only, but I know a few who use OTA to supplant online viewing through Netflix and/or Hulu.

And there are tons of people like me with satellite tv who also have OTA just for the subchannels. We probably weren't counted in any assessment of viewers because OTA isn't the primary viewing method.

 

[Chuck]

Both radio and TV could coexist on these two channels. In markets where there is a TV station on either channel, then the only frequencies available for radio would be the unused channel. After all, there is only so much room at the inn. I'm not aware of any market where there is both a TV Channel 5 and Channel 6. There may be areas where you can receive both, but I suspect they are few and far between. If there is such a place, then it is obvious that expanding the FM band downward will not work in that market, but that still leaves the bulk of the country, where it would work.

A lot of LPTV's on Channel 6 are really "Franken-FM's" Chicago is a good example. I suspect that if the FCC offered these stations a Primary Service FM station on 87.8, they would jump at the chance. After all, their days are currently limited, thanks to the digital transition for TV. That would open up a lot of spectrum for other stations.

Of course, this is dependant on the FCC actually managing the spectrum in a creative manner. It could be done, if they wanted to do it. After all, that is what they were established to do. There are a lot of good people who work at the Commission, but I'm not sure the will is there for them to creatively manage spectrum That is too bad.

 

[Ai4i]

Again, Ludwigent.com has a technology which will place fifty audio channels within the digital bandwidth of a single digital UHF TV subchannel. You just can not beat that concept. Can you, anyone?

 

[Chuck]

Again, Ludwigent.com has a technology which will place fifty audio channels within the digital bandwidth of a single digital UHF TV subchannel. You just can not beat that concept. Can you, anyone?

Considering the bandwidth that is available they must be very highly compressed channels. They are doing amazing things with compression these days, but I'd need to hear it to become a believer. Obviously they currently do that kind of compression in the telephone industry, but I also know what my cell phone sounds like.

 

[Tom Wells]

Again, Ludwigent.com has a technology which will place fifty audio channels within the digital bandwidth of a single digital UHF TV subchannel. You just can not beat that concept. Can you, anyone?

Considering the bandwidth that is available they must be very highly compressed channels. They are doing amazing things with compression these days, but I'd need to hear it to become a believer. Obviously they currently do that kind of compression in the telephone industry, but I also know what my cell phone sounds like.

Haw! Just for fun sometime, call a family member when they are in a vehicle, (and have them stop for safety)....then have them
tune in an AM radio station and place the phone somewhere near the speaker at a moderate volume.

Just see if ANY of the audio is intelligible.

I've tried once or twice to have my wife do this (a block or two away) while I try to adjust output tuning on my part 15 AM.
It's an almost impossible task, the audio is so clumpy and distorted it's barely possible to hear any qualitative difference in the audio
over the cellphone. Landlines really do sound so much better than cellphones. I would rather have my old Nolkia analog phone back,
where the audio sometimes had extraneous noise, but wasn't so full of artifacts that intelligibility was destroyed.

It would be great if my cellphone audio sounded ANYWHERE as good as my AM radio station.
I can still hear 20 khz, but I bet my GSM AT&T service only goes up to 2.5 khz, while old fashioned copper pair service easily went past
3 khz. And it did not garble the audio but had a smooth rolloff that sounded at least somewhat natural.

Not sure why the FCC permits newer technologies that sound worse than older technologies, while charging ever more for the degraded
quality.

 

[Ai4i]

Considering the bandwidth that is available they must be very highly compressed channels.

The LudwigEnt system uses 3½ MHz of RF bandwidth; I don't know how much error correction (redundancy) is involved.
All of Sirius's or all of XM's channels are contained within 1.8 MHz of RF bandwidth duplicated several times to fill the 12½ of RF bandwidth (reliability wins over quality).
As we are dealing with a single site per DTV channel, not two satellites plus terrestrial repeaters, I think they would only have a live feed plus one or two delayed feeds AND if we keep to just fifty stereo pairs, the audio quality should exceed XM's original sq. Fifty channels are enough to handle three times the number of AM's anywhere plus a lot more.

 

[Casey]

It would have to do more than exceed the audio quality of Sirius/XM. Any next-gen technology that wants to hold it's own in the future will have to sound near-perfect to the untrained, average ear. This system would be in place for a long time and needs to be able to compete with current and future technologies. Some internet services already deliver up to 320kbps mp3/ogg.

 

[tomservo]

It would be great if my cellphone audio sounded ANYWHERE as good as my AM radio station.

Now THAT's a subject I could kvetch about for days. For whatever reason, I have a LOT of trouble "decoding" what I hear on phone calls that involve cellular phones. Whether it's a friend calling me cell to cell, or a caller on an AM talk show, they just sound like gobbledegook. I'd like to think this problem is also why I'm so good at picking apart lossy audio codecs but it's a pain in everyday use and one of the reasons I really don't use the phone unless it's an emergency.

In some ways, I always found analog cellular audio to potentially be better than what POTS could deliver. And in the early days of GSM service in the US in the late 90s/early 2000s, most carriers used the full rate version of the GSM codec which sounded a lot better than CDMA or any permutations thereof. Nowadays, CDMA still sounds bad (and sounds worse when the cell site is loaded up) and GSM carriers are all running the half-rate codec. The full rate codec ran at only 12.1 kbit/s and the half rate is a puny 6.1 kbit/sec so it's no wonder it sounds so bad. And since it's geared towards speech, any kind of background noise or music just devolves into a garbled mess.

Maybe there's hope, though. SK Telecom in South Korea has launched HD Call Audio that runs something like 50 Hz to 7-8 kHz. Whoever thought something that was sub-AM quality would be called "HD"? LOL.

Anywho, the point (and I do have one) is that I think audio quality is finally starting to become an issue for average folks again. And that won't help HD radio's case any. Or DAB. Or especially XM/Sirius! The only high quality outlet in the future is going to be the internet, if we can find a way to end bandwidth caps.

 

[Ai4i]

T-mobile and their reseller, SIMple mobile now offer unlimited 4G for $20 on top of their unlimited voice plans and all Android phones can share with up to five devices with blue teeth.