Thread

1. trollbridge · 1786041906 · focus · HN ↗

   Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. The latter two are how people consume video and TV to a large degree today.

   In exchange, we have a great deal of spectrum tied up for terrestrial TV, much of which goes to running infomercials or else is surreptitiously leased for terrestrial data broadcasts. And the government gets to decide to regulate it so it becomes inherently politicised - like favouring certain owners.

   Realistically - this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.

   (Radio is pretty much the same boat but I can see a case to be made for keeping some analog FM radio broadcasts. The 6MHz per channel for TV is insane.)

   1. wmf · 1786042710 · focus · HN ↗

      I heard in some European countries they packed digital SD channels into less spectrum (one 6 MHz channel can carry 4-5 TV channels). We should have done that here instead of broadcasting HD.

      1. jyoung8607 · 1786043786 · focus · HN ↗

         That's already widely done in the US.

         If you plug in an antenna and scan for local channels, what used to be one analog TV channel on colloquially-named "channel 7" in the defined channel 7 frequency range will now be seen as "channel 7-1" which is often (but not always!) actually broadcast on the old frequency. During the ATSC transition, it was important to retain the branding and consumer memory of "channel 7" even when the RF transport frequency changed.

         The transition opened the ability to have an arbitrary number of digital subchannels, 7-2, 7-3, etc etc. The total bitrate available on a given ATSC broadcast is fixed, but it can be partitioned among multiple MPEG streams. The typical setup is one (occasional two) HD channels and several SD channels. Obviously there's a balancing act between bitrate and visual quality for each subchannel. It's often used as a way to broadcast older (read: cheaper) syndicated SD content on which they can run more ads while keeping the main HD channel quality reasonably acceptable.

         1. wmf · 1786043987 · focus · HN ↗

            That's not what I'm talking about though. We should have repacked ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox onto a single channel.

            1. toast0 · 1786057323 · focus · HN ↗

               If you're gonna smash everything onto a single channel, you may as well turn the whole thing off.

               Gonna look like absolute trash. Might be almost acceptable with atsc 3, except for the diaster of DRM and new proprietary audio codecs that brings.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.