Americans confused about TV transition

Consumer Electronics
#1

I just posted the article Americans confused about TV transition.

A Best Buy survey conducted by GfK Research North America found that 88% of the Americans know about the upcoming TV transition, but a majority finds it confusing. Why is this all happening and what…

Read the full article here:  [http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/14773-Americans-confused-about-TV-transition.html](http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/14773-Americans-confused-about-TV-transition.html)

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#2

And to top it off, Best Buy and other big box retailers are actively lying to customers about what the transition actually means in order to sell high priced HDTV’s to unsuspecting consumer. The majority of which are probably on satellite or cable and won’t be affected at all by the transition. Most Americans fail to realize that this transition ONLY affects over the air broadcasts which represent a smaller market than cable or satellite. It’s one thing if the consumer is in the market for a new tv anyway, but, quite another to be dishonest to people in order to sell product. Happens all the time, I know. I’m not naive…just simply disgusted.

#3

Currently, I subscribe to Cable TV and only use one cable box for my HDTV which supplies the HD content… The other TV’s are just line only, which carry a good amount of channels for viewing… My problem, as with many others, is will the cable company REQUIRE me to rent their cable box in order to view the channels I currently can watch or will they still be available using that digital to analog converter I can get for my sets? Another reason for the cable company to fleece me by requiring me to use their equipment…

#4

Cable companies aren’t required to switch the cable signals to digital, since their not OTA and delivered VIA copper. However I would guess eventually cable companies would ditch analog and use that part of the spectrum to ramp of their delivery of HDTV.

#5

I have to agree with Zod. Eventually QAM decoding is going to be required for even basic cable, but, that is not a requirement right now. That’ll not be mandated, either. It’ll be completely up to the cable company to decide. And they can’t force you to rent a box, either. Part of some of the new laws and regulations state that boxes should be available to consumers to purchase and they must work with cable company’s systems. So far that’s a pipe dream, but, a new standard coming out might make it work even for on demand programming. We’ll see.

#6

One of our local channels is advertising that on some upcoming day soon (June 27, I think), they are going to broad cast over the air in digital only at a certain time of day, for 30 seconds or something like that. They state that if your TV reception goes dark duting this time, you will need to do something in Feb. I think they are actually being much more clear about it than I am. They will probably do this more than once between now and Feb.

#7

Pretty good idea, actually. I wish more of them would do that. Then the big retail chains wouldn’t be able to rip people off as much when people find out they have to do…absolutely nothing.