OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

I don't know. Seems I have gone full circle.
I remember only OTA analog. Then in the late 70's early 80's our
town, Tucson, AZ (pre cable) offered a small "special" curved antenna
that would pick up HBO only. Wow.
Then cable..........
I got tired of the various lines and poor signal on various channels.
Got DishNetwork. Every channel clear.... WOW (still had to have an
antenna for locals)
Then more satellites and locals on dish...... all clear. SD

I got my new Vizio and just for kicks hooked up my old roof ant that
had been unused for a few years. WOW! HD to the max..... Real OTA
HD.

I have dropped my locals off Dish. And reduced my Dish selection. Now
only $19.99 per mo plus tax.
I am extremely happy and thinking about dropping dish all
together.......
my 2¢ YB


On Nov 16, 5:37 pm, "Tantalust" wrote:
"Bob Miller" wrote:

Habitual, hopeless and pointless/childish arguing, with the *perfectly*
inappropriate crowd, (mostly OTA ATSC HDTV proponents), no less. As per
usual.

It's been eight years (!!) of your running with this compulsion, a common
symptom of your ongoing obsessional-delusional mental illness.

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

In article Larry Bud writes:
Lots of good reasons for OTA. So why are broadcasters not telling the
public about them?

Because Bob, nobody ****ing needs to watch TV over the air. I don't
know one person that doesn't have cable or satellite, HD or not.

I do. Apparently you don't get out much. :-)

Also, what of someone who gets local channels and networks over the air,
and gets one or two specialty channels from satellite? (such as MPEG FTA
or c-band)? How do you count them? They definitely get their TV over the
air.

Alan

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

It's not that the penetration is only one percent, but that I'm in the
99th percentile ahead of everyone else.

Seriously, the only reason that the number is not higher is that
digital and HDTV demand has been marketed by the cable and satellite
companies, from point of sale to television ads. They want the
consumer to buy a new set to replace their analog, and they want the
monthly service fees. Marketing works, and the stakes are high.

What's at risk is the percentage of people who only get cable so they
get good reception of network TV. When people learn how free it is,
subchannels will become a new domain replacing basic cable, and OTA
HDTV will not be disappearing, at least in urban areas. Only collusion
can destroy OTA programming, because what broadcaster wants to give up
what they got to their competitors?

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

wrote in message
...
It's not that the penetration is only one percent, but that I'm in the
99th percentile ahead of everyone else.

Seriously, the only reason that the number is not higher is that
digital and HDTV demand has been marketed by the cable and satellite
companies, from point of sale to television ads. They want the
consumer to buy a new set to replace their analog, and they want the
monthly service fees. Marketing works, and the stakes are high.

What's at risk is the percentage of people who only get cable so they
get good reception of network TV. When people learn how free it is,
subchannels will become a new domain replacing basic cable, and OTA
HDTV will not be disappearing, at least in urban areas. Only collusion
can destroy OTA programming, because what broadcaster wants to give up
what they got to their competitors?

There are those of us for whom it is not really a matter of choice. Before
cable, I was able to get an almost tolerable picture from the major OTA
stations on a good winter day. During the summer, with the leaves on the
trees, the signal ranged from poor to nonexistent. After 9/11, there was no
viewable signal - period. All I wanted was to be able to watch the local OTA
stations. But as long as I had cable anyway, I got used to having some
options, and never went back to the major local stations. As far as I'm
concerned, cable and satellite offer mostly trash (even after you filter out
the home shopping networks, the religious channels, the lifestyle stuff,
etc.), but OTA offers 100 percent trash. The first few days after I got my
HDTV, before I signed up for the cable company's digital service package,
the only HDTV content I could receive was the local stations whose HDTV
broadcasts were being retransmitted on the cable. I scanned through them a
couple times but chose to watch SDTV cable stations rather than what they
were offering. It is truly a Vast Wasteland.

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

On Nov 18, 3:55 am, wrote:
It's not that the penetration is only one percent, but that I'm in the
99th percentile ahead of everyone else.

Seriously, the only reason that the number is not higher is that
digital and HDTV demand has been marketed by the cable and satellite
companies, from point of sale to television ads. They want the
consumer to buy a new set to replace their analog, and they want the
monthly service fees. Marketing works, and the stakes are high.

What's at risk is the percentage of people who only get cable so they
get good reception of network TV. When people learn how free it is,
subchannels will become a new domain replacing basic cable, and OTA
HDTV will not be disappearing, at least in urban areas. Only collusion
can destroy OTA programming, because what broadcaster wants to give up
what they got to their competitors?

That is so true about marketing.
I was in Costco looking at all the HDTV's. Signs all over. HD AS EASY
AS 1-2-3
Buy TV - Have Cable or Sat - Enjoy
They do not mention Ant or OTA....
That is where the REAL CLEAR LEAST AMOUT OF COMPRESSION OR SIGNAL
PROCESSING BEST HD SIGNAL IS.

my 2¢ YB

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

On Nov 18, 12:17 pm, "Nick Danger" wrote:

options, and never went back to the major local stations. As far as I'm
concerned, cable and satellite offer mostly trash (even after you filter out
the home shopping networks, the religious channels, the lifestyle stuff,
etc.), but OTA offers 100 percent trash.

You don't watch PBS or you couldn't or wouldn't say that. The reality
is that most TV, cable or OTA, is trash. You're just trying to get as
many channels as possible to reduce the chances of you surfing and
finding nothing of interest to you.

Nothing wrong with that, but with my DVR, I'm already watching too
much TV. I cannot justify the monthly cost of HDTV for a household of
one.

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

wrote in message
...
On Nov 18, 12:17 pm, "Nick Danger" wrote:

options, and never went back to the major local stations. As far as I'm
concerned, cable and satellite offer mostly trash (even after you filter
out
the home shopping networks, the religious channels, the lifestyle stuff,
etc.), but OTA offers 100 percent trash.

You don't watch PBS or you couldn't or wouldn't say that. The reality
is that most TV, cable or OTA, is trash. You're just trying to get as
many channels as possible to reduce the chances of you surfing and
finding nothing of interest to you.

Nothing wrong with that, but with my DVR, I'm already watching too
much TV. I cannot justify the monthly cost of HDTV for a household of
one.

I apologize for that oversight. Yes, PBS is broadcast OTA, but I tend to
forget that because it does not fit the profile of the rest of the OTA
stations here, and it's at 13 - way up at the end of the VHF stations. Even
though I know better, I was subconsciously thinking of it as a cable
station. Apparently, our cable company didn't think there was enough demand
for it, so they didn't carry the HD broadcasts on their basic service.
Still, it was better to watch PBS SD than the commercial networks OTA.

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

On Nov 15, 4:02 pm, Bob Miller wrote:
Larry Bud wrote:
Lots of good reasons for OTA. So why are broadcasters not telling the
public about them?

Because Bob, nobody ****ing needs to watch TV over the air. I don't
know one person that doesn't have cable or satellite, HD or not.

Sounds like you agree with me that free OTA is dead.

When naysayers make these predictions, it surprises me how
historically wrong they have been. They're greatest victory may have
been Betamax, but that's only because VHS won. Naysayers have doubted
the telephone, movies, talkies, radio, television, color television,
the Internet, and now OTA digital and Hi Def.

Why the negativity? Because anthropologically, people don't want to
change anymore than they have to. As long as analog is the lowest cost
option, digital will play second fiddle. The second part of the
argument: I don't know anybody without cable or sat, is classical
centric thinking. Ask yourself, how much do you make? Are you a senior
citizen on a fixed income? Are you a single mother of four? Do you
have financial obligations that compromise your ability to pay a
recurring monthly cable bill?

Personally, I know a considerable percentage of people who don't have
cable or sat, I am one of them. Many people are just not interested in
TV. If they aren't, then they obviously wouldn't bother with this
forum. Then there's me, the first layperson to congratulate a Michigan
station manager for converting their newscast to high definition.

I do not claim to be representative of the general population, but I
proved to the manager was that OTA-HD was not a snuffleluphagus. Most
likely, all digital needs is to subsidize the conversion for senior
citizens and low income households. But, as I have said before, the
combo of highest quality HD and increased SD capacity is a serious
threat to the cable/sat companies. These companies will be able to
overcome the bandwidth problem, but they can never compete on the
price. And the border town trump card is that Canadian programming is
not available on sat, and only partially available on cable.

OTA networks have retained the highest ratings share for their
programs. They have not become obsolete as naysayers have predicted.
Their dominance has merely been diluted by the availablity of
alternative programming. They will not give up the market share from
inclusive programming-- that is their trump card.

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

On Nov 18, 2:59 pm, wrote:

historically wrong they have been. They're greatest victory may have

Darn it. I thought I changed that. Their-- their!!!!

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

"Nick Danger" wrote in message
...
I have a feeling this is another Y2K crisis in the making - lots of panic
over something that's going to be largely a non-event.

On this point, I've always found this point of view a bit silly. While Y2K
might never have been the mass disaster some suggested it would be, I do
think the primary reason it only caused minor problems was because so many
businesses spent so many millions of dollars in advance to make sure that
didn't happen. This was a lose-lose situation for businesses: be laughed at
afterward for wasintg boatloads of money "for what turned out to be
nothing", or be eviscerated for failing to prepare properly for a problem
they should have foreseen.

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

"Matthew Vaughan" wrote in message
...
"Nick Danger" wrote in message
...
I have a feeling this is another Y2K crisis in the making - lots of panic
over something that's going to be largely a non-event.

On this point, I've always found this point of view a bit silly. While Y2K
might never have been the mass disaster some suggested it would be, I do
think the primary reason it only caused minor problems was because so many
businesses spent so many millions of dollars in advance to make sure that
didn't happen. This was a lose-lose situation for businesses: be laughed
at afterward for wasintg boatloads of money "for what turned out to be
nothing", or be eviscerated for failing to prepare properly for a problem
they should have foreseen.

The biggest threat from Y2K (which actually did happen in numerous cases)
was that webpages, statements, forms, etc. would print the year as 19100. In
the format that computers use to represent dates, the year 2000 has no
special significance. The overreaction to Y2K had a much more profound
effect on the US economy (as well as other western countries). The surge in
demand for programmers to deal with this "looming crisis" led to a shortage
of qualified programmers and gave various third-world countries (especially
India) a chance to get a foothold. Now 2000 has passed and hundreds of
thousands of programmers have been laid off, but the software industry is
hooked on low wage programmers, so they are continuing the practice that
served them so well in 1999: whining about the shortage of programmers and
insisting that they need to export jobs and issue visas to bring in cheap
programmers from other countries. Now that the programming jobs have moved
overseas, other knowledge jobs are being targeted as well.

Anyway, getting back to Y2K - it never was a threat, but there is a date
that has potential to cause havoc: January 19, 2038. That's when the 32-bit
counter that stores the time wraps back to zero - which in most software is
January 1, 1970. But even that is not likely to cause planes to fall out of
the air or nuclear power plants to melt down. I wouldn't want to be an
accountant on that date though.

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

Nick Danger wrote:

"Matthew Vaughan" wrote in message
...
"Nick Danger" wrote in message
...
I have a feeling this is another Y2K crisis in the making - lots of
panic over something that's going to be largely a non-event.

On this point, I've always found this point of view a bit silly. While
Y2K might never have been the mass disaster some suggested it would
be, I do think the primary reason it only caused minor problems was
because so many businesses spent so many millions of dollars in
advance to make sure that didn't happen. This was a lose-lose
situation for businesses: be laughed at afterward for wasintg
boatloads of money "for what turned out to be nothing", or be
eviscerated for failing to prepare properly for a problem they should
have foreseen.

The biggest threat from Y2K (which actually did happen in numerous
cases) was that webpages, statements, forms, etc. would print the year
as 19100. In the format that computers use to represent dates, the year
2000 has no special significance. The overreaction to Y2K had a much
more profound effect on the US economy (as well as other western
countries). The surge in demand for programmers to deal with this
"looming crisis" led to a shortage of qualified programmers and gave
various third-world countries (especially India) a chance to get a
foothold. Now 2000 has passed and hundreds of thousands of programmers
have been laid off, but the software industry is hooked on low wage
programmers, so they are continuing the practice that served them so
well in 1999: whining about the shortage of programmers and insisting
that they need to export jobs and issue visas to bring in cheap
programmers from other countries. Now that the programming jobs have
moved overseas, other knowledge jobs are being targeted as well.

Anyway, getting back to Y2K - it never was a threat, but there is a date
that has potential to cause havoc: January 19, 2038. That's when the
32-bit counter that stores the time wraps back to zero - which in most
software is January 1, 1970. But even that is not likely to cause planes
to fall out of the air or nuclear power plants to melt down. I wouldn't
want to be an accountant on that date though.

Some of the point you raise are rooted in languages other than the main
business language, COBOL, and its data representations. 2000 would most
likely be represented by those programs as 1900. In fact, many school
districts sent out kindergarten notices to people over 100 years old in
the run up to 2000.

The only serious problems I heard about vis 2000 were in Japan. They
miscalculated the leap year in some cases (2000 was a leap year, 2100
will not be, so stay tuned), which caused a fair bit of turmoil.

As far as blaming Y2K for the collapse in programmers salaries, I
heartily disagree. Lots of hairdressers, mechanics and art history
majors became "programmers" during the .com bubble. The collapse was
caused by the .com bubble bursting. When that happened, silly wages were
wrung out of the system. One of my former colleagues had a college
student daughter who was pulling down $10,000 a month as a web designer
in mid 2001, long after Y2K.

Matthew

--
"All you need to start an asylum is an empty room and the right kind of
people". Alexander Bullock ("My Man Godfrey" 1936):

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

"Larry Bud" wrote in message
...
Lots of good reasons for OTA. So why are broadcasters not telling the
public about them?

Because Bob, nobody ****ing needs to watch TV over the air. I don't
know one person that doesn't have cable or satellite, HD or not.

===========================
I know several people, in addition to me, that only watch OTA!
Why not?
It is free and it is all HD in prime time.

Paying for it is silly.

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

On Dec 18, 2:02 pm, "Richard C." wrote:
"Larry Bud" wrote in message

... Lots of good reasons for OTA. So why are broadcasters not telling the
public about them?

Because Bob, nobody ****ing needs to watch TV over the air. I don't
know one person that doesn't have cable or satellite, HD or not.

===========================
I know several people, in addition to me, that only watch OTA!
Why not?
It is free and it is all HD in prime time.

Paying for it is silly.

I'm another OTA only, and I know a number of OTA only viewers. So,
I'd say "nobody needs to watch TV from cable or satellite, HD or
not". On the other hand, I'd also disagree and say that paying
*isn't* silly, provided the payer receives something he wants which
isn't available OTA. Now I have a friend who gets *really* basic
cable for a low cost. We compared channel line-ups. In the Chicago
market, I actually get *more* choices plus HD, while he only gets
analog cable. Now *that* doesn't make sense. To pay less and get
more with OTA is the only reasonable choice. I expect him to convert
when he gets his first HD/ATSC TV.

Dan (Woj...)

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

The real losers are the cable people who can't tell that they're
watching Squishy-vision.

OTA DTV hits ONE%
 

On Nov 15, 1:44 pm, Bob Miller wrote:
NadCixelsyd wrote:
Sounds like you agree with me that free OTA is dead.

Bob Miller

What about me, Bob. All my TV is OTA, digital, ATSC, 8VSB, and I
LOVE
IT because it's FREE. I don't even have a VHF antenna. Yes, I
would
appreciate having more channels, but I'm unwilling to pay $800
per
year. The 8 ATSC stations within 50 miles of my house are quite
adequate (19 if you include duplicate network affiliations,
shopping
channels and foreign language stations which I exclude.)

I've asked you many times, but you ignore the question. ATSC is
the
law, so what do you expect me to do about it? Do you expect me
to
give up my FREE television?

And why does my local NBC/ABC/FOX/CBS/CW/PBS affiliate broadcast
ATSC
if only 1% are watching it? What's their motivation? Surely, my
cable company would carry those stations even without the "must
carry"
rule.

BTW how many people do you know have and use OTA DTV who have cable
or
satellite also or are OTA only?

Bob Miller

That would be me. The wife wants TCM and the kids want Nickelodeon but
that is the only video reason for cable. The internet is on cable
which is the REAL reason it's there. All the HD at our house comes
through the HTPC and its 2 networked 'cousins' with ATSC tuners. Love
those 500 gig USB drives fro HDTV.

GG