Monday, 15 June 2009

In Passing

DTV transition fallout


Analog is still around.
Turns out that my local “SkyTrak Weather Network[1]” LPTV.NTSC transmission on channel 50 remains on the air, which gives me one less reason to rush out and acquire a CECB.  (This weekend’s watching, aside from a few minutes of weather radar: Selections from Looney Tunes Golden Collection v.6, and a couple of episodes of Waiting for God, season 1.[2])

Missing stations - in the primary service area.
At dinner with a friend last evening, she recounted the results of her rescan-after-switchover: Her HDTV gets about half of the channels it’s “supposed” to receive: No CBS affiliate, no CW affiliate, either no NBC or no ABC (I forget which). Does get PBS, ABC (or NBC), FOX, and two religious stations. All of the missing channels had been “no problem” in analog.  This is at a location about 2½ miles straight north of downtown - near 30th and Meridian Streets. (Guess she’ll have to put up an antenna, or wait for those rumored power adjustments.)

No urgency for some.
She also gave an account of a conversation she’d had at a party Saturday night attended by a bunch of arts and media types.  Most of those folks do not have cable, and to a man (or woman) none had yet bothered to acquire either a HD television or a converter box.

Grant the possibility of intellectual posturing of the “Why, I simply never watch any television. Except occasionally PBS. And the morning news. And 24...” sort. (You get the idea!)   But even if only partly true, this should be a worry to the networks: The last thing they need in this economy is for this desirable demographic to wander away.


Elsewhere:


-----
[1]  Be warned: This is one of those furshlugginer “WorldNow” [don’t click this one, either] powered sites that takes forever to load if you’re not running high speed. The SkyTrak main page is even worse: Despite disabled Flash and having a bunch of offsite javascript and adservers blocked, it still takes 5 minutes to display.

[2]  Oh look, Season 4 has just been released!

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 19:04:57 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 362 words, total size 4 kb.

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
71kb generated in CPU 0.0186, elapsed 0.4187 seconds.
51 queries taking 0.4106 seconds, 200 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.