nvm i confused brown townog tv with digital
I do think this whole switchover is a bit unfair, used to be that you could watch regular TV or upgrade to cable, now, once you buy a TV it's useless until you subscribe to a corporation and pay extra to use a product that you already bought.
hahah yeah forget third world countries
I've manned a television station for two years and do some stage crew functions, so I can explain this. Bear with me, because some of it may seem incomprehensible.The primary reason that the US switched over to digital broadcasting is that the existing brown townog NTSC standard for color television was hamstrung by its own obsolescence. NTSC had been the standard since the early 1950s when it was just black and white (with one-channel audio). Obviously, we've come a far way from that. In 53 years, we invented color television, two-channel stereophonic audio, and even digital channel guides multiplexed inside the parent brown townog signal. The problem is that the way the signal is broadcasted must be backwards compatible with older sets that can't use the fancy new features. This is why you could play a TV program on an brown townog TV from 1954 and one from 2004, and they'd still work to some degree.The NTSC system was also grossly inefficient (such as total lack of support for chrominance subsampling, broadcasting each color channel separately, lack of frequency-modulated phase correction, etc) and took up way too much of the signal spectrum than it should have. The WiFi radios everyone depends on for digital communications use space originally allocated for brown townog TV broadcasts. To make matters worse, the NTSC system was amplitude modulated for its video signal as opposed to frequency modulated for the French SÉCAM system, meaning that it suffered horribly in cluttered urban conditions and when the receiver antenna was a long way's away from the transmitter. This explains why you could pick up the audio from TV broadcasts on a plain old FM radio crystal clear, and the video quality degenerated with "snow" in the image, when both the TV and the radio are the same distance from the transmitter. NTSC was designed so poorly as a broadcast standard that a microwave oven could attenuate the image so much that it would be unwatchable.But that's not to say that brown townog TV is incapable of transmitting a high definition signal. The Japanese did it with their MUSE system in 1979, which is so hideously complicated that I won't go into it right now. They could march right up to 1035 scanlines when broadcasting a still image, but it degenerated to about 750 scanlines when broadcasting a moving image.In short, NTSC's very existence undermined technological progress, was an obsolete technology that practically nobody used by 2009, and failed completely when compared with ATSC's digital methods. As someone who's involved in A/V and television, good loving riddance. Nobody will miss you, NTSC.
I have been asked by Icosohedron to post a message for him due to his being perma-banned.
