We Just Got The High-Definition Shaft
It would be farfetched to call me anti-government, but I’m beginning to waver.
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission - one of those giant bureaucracies ordinary folks don’t think much about - made a move I don’t fully understand. Nonetheless, it makes me seethe.
The FCC provided the nation’s 1,600 television stations a second channel to broadcast digital programs. That’s gibberish to me, but what it means is that by the year 2006, my TV set (and yours too) will be obsolete.
By late next year, if the timetable is followed, TV stations in the 10 biggest markets (including the Bay Area) will begin sending dual signals - one in the soon-to-be-discarded “analog” mode, the other in “digital” signals.
By then we’ll have a chance to buy, at considerable cost, the new digital TVs. Whoopee!
Converters (at $150 to $500) can extend the use of the nation’s 270 million TV sets that can’t receive wide-screen digital programming. But the converters won’t supply the sharper pictures and better sound promised by digital TV technology.
I bought a new TV set only a few days before those uncaring Washington bureaucrats chose to reinforce that all-American concept of planned obsolescence: buy something today that is basically an antique in disguise because technology is ahead of the marketplace.
My 13-year-old TV set had given us hours of pleasure (and boredom), and I’m loyal to a fault to my material goods.
Our household has two automobiles. One is 11 years old, the baby. The other is almost 14 (and in the repair shop - again - which should be a gigantic clue we ought to junk the thing).
Since our old TV was causing us to squint and to guess at what was happening, I did the normal (male) thing by shopping around at the usual chain stores. After comparing dozens of choices, I bit the bullet - and went into credit card shock.
Our new set is bright and clear. It shows all the colors. This means we can actually follow a dark and dense show like “EZ Streets.” Compared to my old TV, my new set is terrific, but it won’t be good enough for our digital future. (Just what is a digital future, anyway?)
Imagine my upset feelings when I found out days later what I just bought - and hoped to keep for another 13 years - will soon be obsolete.
Those slick salesmen talking their electronic babble never breathed a word about “high definition” digital TV, the wave of the future.
There’s all this claptrap about cable and direct satellite and Internet TVs, stuff that confuses me and, I suspect, many of you too.
Usually minority groups are defined in racial and ethnic terms, but one I belong to is the “non-cable minority group” since ours is among the 40 percent or so of American households without cable.
After I had bought my new TV, I was musing about buying a direct-satellite system that included local broadcast channels. Such a system should be available this year.
I was prepared to skip over conventional cable, which is passe, I hear, and go straight to the hottest technology - direct satellite.
Now that high-definition digital TV is said to be the true wave of the future, should I hold off till, say, 2005, when that new technology has worked out its bugs and prices are reasonable? Or should I listen to those bumper stickers, “Kill your TV”?
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