auntblabby wrote:
Ichinin wrote:
Arran wrote:
Terrestrial television is a debatable one. Some critics say that digital terrestrial television was developed primarily to appease older people who preferred the look of a yagi to a satellite dish.
Television has no right to exist! The internet can deliver pretty much any show you wanna watch, without some moron TV planner deciding for you what to watch. The concept of force fed entertainment has to DIE.
all these tech elitists are getting me down.
not everybody lives in the cities where high-speed internet infrastructure enables superhigh-bit internet service for web-based tv service.
I find the opposite sort of happening. TV is getting worse and worse as on demand/netflix/internet is taking over, as there's less competition. I find it a neat medium, just the lack of variety is what gets me. Like I like Sky.fm and Di.FM Android apps on my phone, and use them to listen to music in my car. It's the radio, just online. With a bunch of stations of music I find enjoyable. I use it so I can discover new artists and things I like. Like I like Russian pop music. Sky.FM and Di.FM both came out with Russian channels. I'm not Rusisan, I have no clue how to find Russian music, so this has been a bit of a Godsend to me.
And my issue with TV and radio is there's no particular reason FOR the lack of variety really. Just the FCC is really restrictive, along with royalty/copyright laws. Also, I believe terrestrial TV broadcasts are fantastic. The new ATSC television standard is almost borderline miraculous in it's power. I really like it. Theoretically with ATSC, you can simulcast like a hundred channels per frequency used. That's sweet.
I think personally the forced ATSC switch was actually a lot to do with cable and satellite companies. ATSC had legitimate potential to just make cable and satellite be obsolete for television. However, for people to adopt it without the government forcing people, it'd need programming people would wanna watch. I know ATSC has some cool secondary channels on each channel. Like FOX has a network entirely of old programming on ATSC. Speaking of radio, too, HD radio is the same way. FM radio started out this way, too. As a "premium" but free band. FM used to have full albums on it, for example. As programming got better, more people bought FM, and it overtook AM. However, the government spent a gazillion dollars for the ATSC switch to be forced to happen, and since it was forced to happen, new programming didn't have to be added to try to get people to buy the new standard. Like if ATSC got popular, Fox, for example, could very very easily just simulcast, say, Fox News, Fox Business, and all it's affiliates over it's Fox station terrestrially, and then people wouldn't have to pay the cable companies to watch Fox's other networks. This might happen regardless of the government forcing the switch, too, as maybe TV producers might get fed up with cable companies and just do terrestrial broadcasting like I'm describing, as it'd not cost them anymore money to do really, whereas with the old standard you'd need to broadcast a new frequency for a new channel.
Also, I LOVE HD Radio. My area, the country station has a commercial free classic country station, oldies station has a commercial free 1950s and 60s only station, pop station has a station specifically for dance music/techno, commercial free. It's nice technology. And it's FREE.