Digital TV offers faster speeds, better mileage

By RON BROCHU

By this time next month, Duluth’s antenna farm will blanket the Northland with digital TV signals in a foolish technology change that’s already outdated.

Proponents of the analog-to-digital transformation contend the move will improve picture quality, allow broadcasters to offer more channels and help emergency responders by giving them the former TV frequencies. Their overhyped message, however, overlooks much and paints a thin glossy sheen over system flaws.

We need look only at the recent past to debunk claims of improved quality. It’s the same argument made to promote the replacement of vinyl recordings with CDs, and analog cell phones with digital units. The argument for CDs was that they wouldn’t skip like vinyl. That was a crock, crock, crock, crock, crock, crock, crock, crock, crock, crock. Digital cellular, meanwhile, was going to be crystal clear. “Ca you h r me ow?”

Indeed, digital will allow local TV broadcasters to offer more channels. With the same half-million watts, they can pump out several signals. That ignores the fact, however, that just as many signals can be carried to any location in North America by a few satellites that consume only a couple hundred watts of solar energy. So why waste all the costly, scarce fossil fuel to power transmitters in every burb coast-to-coast?

This argument also fails to address the issue of whether local broadcasters can afford to provide multiple channels, particularly in small metros like Duluth-Superior. The advertising pie hasn’t grown in decades. Every year, the slices grow thinner. In a no-growth market, expansion is only possible at the expense of another player. There’s not enough advertising revenue for everybody to survive.

Moreover, how will those additional stations be managed? Hopefully, the common ownership of multiple radio stations won’t serve as the example. Can you say “dead air?” Or how about stations that simultaneously play two overlapping commercials? It’s the electronic equivalent of an erection that lasts more than four hours. Enough already!

The need for emergency responders to have more frequency spectrum grew out of the 9-11 attacks, when intra-agency communication failed miserably. But the added channels are useless unless municipalities can afford new equipment, and most of them can’t. The added channels will be useless without equipment that can put them to use.

A few things are for sure.

• The digital conversion has provided a cash infusion to overseas manufacturers. They’re working overtime to export flat-panel TVs to the United States, increasing our trade deficit.

• Old analog TVs will be cast aside in large number when the conversion takes place. Rather than paying a recycling fee, some owners will carelessly dump them in landfills, ditches or other inappropriate places.

• Some unscrupulous “recyclers” will merely export old televisions to foreign outfits that burn or bury the toxic components, endangering the environment in other countries. Out of sight, out of mind, eh?

But the conversion has some advantages. It will allow Americans to observe their financial demise in high definition. And if president-elected Barack Obama offers another taxpayer incentive package, which is likely, we could learn whether average people use the money to buy necessities or immediately squander it on enormous mind-numbing flat-screen TVs. In our entitlement-oriented society, the answer could be shocking, for most people believe we deserve that bigger, crisper picture even as the economy crumbles – just as they believe we deserve 20 percent annual growth in stock, bond and real estate values – at a minimum.

The digital revolution, unfortunately, has its limits. It won’t propel Duluth out of its budget deficit, Minnesota out of its revenue shortfall nor America out of its credit collapse. No amount of hype, including constant televised ticker-tape messages, will squeeze the city’s retiree healthcare costs into a beautiful new spectrum devoid of whining retired cops. Darn!

Hopefully, the digital signals will perform better when transmitters are raised to full power. Currently, some channels are nothing to brag about, pixilating or disappearing entirely only a mile from Observation Hill. Expect an uproar if the service doesn’t improve.

The conversion’s success could influence the less-hyped move to digital radio, which is taking off like a herd of turtles.

Like digital TV, digital radio more logically would be broadcast from low-power satellites, but that won’t happen. And it also will greatly benefit foreign manufacturers, because American companies no longer make radios, or much of anything for that matter, because we have labor laws and pollution controls. So we can anticipate more U.S. dollars flowing to emerging nations that soon will have a higher standard of living than America, despite their filthy air and water.

This country, by the way, lags others in the digital conversion, just as it lags others in providing broadband internet access – even as we pat ourselves on the back thinking America leads the pack. Our internet access also is among the costliest when compared with other nations, and providers are paving the way to make it even more expensive by limiting the volume of information we can receive without paying a surcharge.

They contend it’s to prevent heavy users from clogging the system, but many believe the true intent is to prevent people from watching the equivalent of television via computer. That, of course, would offer competition to cable TV giants, which seek to monopolize their highly overpriced services, including “bundles” that cost far more than buying individual components from separate providers.

Author Ron Brochu knows a ruse when he sees one. He archives his ramblings at www.ronbrochublog.com, where your comments will be posted whether they make sense or not.

Published in the Jan. 16, 2009 Northland Reader