You’re right. I admit that I haven’t studied the specifics of the switch all that much. Since I’ve had cable TV for close to 30 years now and can’t see myself ever going back to an antenna, I overlooked that part of the equation.

Nothing but a perfect signal works proper. F***ing s***

@7 and @95, ok guys…show me where welfare and school lunch programs were cut. Even nancy pelosi and harry reed have stated on the House and Senate floors that the programs you mentioned had increases in the budget, just not as large as these two wanted. Sorta like the health insurance for the kids that they were making a major fuss about a few months back. Illegals would have got this (they dont ask your residency in California and California has the largest illegal population in the country) A couple states wanted to make this available for people making as much as $60,000.00 a year even after pelosi and reed said this would not happen thus making them out to be liars. They were offered to increase this to $35,000.00 top scale, and they refused. Same here with your little myth. The budget for these was increased according to the US Budget Office, just not as much as the Democrats wanted, thus giving them the ability to say it was cut. Now I am no math expert, but if I increased a line item by say $2.00 and you wanted $4.00, if you called it a cut then you would be lying as it was increased, just not as much as you wanted it to be.

agreed!

And we still need tv because…? Seems like most everything is available online.

1. If you have cable (Comcast, Cablevision, Time/Warner, etc), satellite (DirecTV, etc), or IPTV (AT&T U-Verse, Verizon FIOS, etc), then the switch to digital will have ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT on you. You will not need a new TV, you will not need a converter box, you will not need a new box from your TV company. There will be NO change to your service.

2. Digital does not mean HD. Yes, HD is often digital, but that doesn’t mean that digital is always HD. YouTube videos are digital, does that make them HD?

3. The only people this change will affect are the ones who use an antenna, either roof-mounted or rabbit ears. Antennas pick up the signals, and then the tuner built into the TV or VCR separates or “tunes” the channel you want to watch. They’re changing the signal and it will no longer be compatible with the old tuners. So you get a separate converter box that acts as a tuner, and outputs a signal your old TV can understand.

Think of it like this; It’s as if they’re changing the voltage of your electrical outlets. You can’t just plug old devices in because they were designed to work with the old system. But if you get an adapter, you can can continue to use your old equipment.

About the switch to digital; A lot of people think digital signals are better than analog. I’m not one of them. They have the potential to be better, but currently, they’re not.

Analog is like shades of grey, while digital is like black & white. Under analog, the signal strength determines how good the picture looks. Under digital, it always looks good, as long as the signal can be received. Sounds good, right?

The problem is that digital has basically no margin for error. With analog, if there is interference with the signal, it degrades the picture. If there is interference in a digital signal, some of the bits are lost and the image freezes, or breaks up into little colored blocks. So with analog, except under extreme conditions, you can continue to watch the picture and hear the audio. With digital, even a little interference can render the picture unwatchable for several seconds at a time.

Also, since digital signals are sent as heavily compressed mpeg streams, you can often see compression artifacts in the image. This is most noticeable during dark scenes, where some of the background will appear in shades of grey, or appear to “swim”. It can also be seen during fast action scenes, where you will often seen the image become rather blocky as it struggles to keep up with the movement.

There are ways to avoid these problems, but they all require the use of more bandwidth, something no company is willing to do.

I got something you can bow to.
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Whats wrong @88? Truth hurt or are you one of the idiots that has spewing false info and are now upset that you got called to the carpet for it?

Over 98% of the posts here are by little people who are trying to make themselves sound more intelligent then they really are. All it took was a simple search with Google and less then 15 minutes of my time to disprove 98% of the posts here. Sorta makes you wonder why they bothered if they did not know what they were talking about in the first place.

Congratulations, snob. You win the Total A$$ of the Day award. Jerks like you probably also feel that if someone can’t afford groceries, they should just stop eating. Your (lack of) humanity and compassion for those less fortunate than you is underwhelming to say the least.

I got something you can bow to.