So quantity over quality. The UK used to have 4-5 analogue TV stations (the fifth wasn't available everywhere), now it has digital with something like 100+ channels all constantly broadcasting low quality, repetitive rubbish. We got rid of the analogue stations to make way for "+1" channels where they broadcast the same thing 1 hour later. It's a complete waste of the spectrum.
Apparently in the early days of HDTV, cable/satellite companies would slowly reduce the quality of broadcasts until people started complaining. At which point they stopped.
When BBC HD was a channel, its quanily was black and white to everything else, now even they are in on the reduced bandwidth game :(
In the UK, all channels are typically transmitted from all transmitters (with some regional programming on some channels) and except for some locations where there's too much spectrum overlap and some channels are missing. Right now, they're in transition to digital (DVB-T) so that's probably not quite true anymore, as some transmitters don't have analog channels anymore. Transmitters are usually also too far apart to be able to receive a good enough signal from more than one.
It is worse if you have poor signal. Digital either works and looks great or it's not watchable. An analog station might look kinda snowy but be completely watchable. I used to be able to get a few channels before the switchover on my bedroom TV with rabbit ears, after the switchover I got 1 or 2 on a good day because the signal strength was just not strong enough.
In rural places in the US, it's terrible for television. Several years ago, it was mandated that TV stations switch from analogue to digital.
Now instead of getting a little static and being able to understand 100% of what is said and shown over the air; it's now 10% recognizable video 90% visual blocks, and 0% audio.
Interesting to see the angry comments about how Digital TV fails more than Analog.
I don't watch TV so I dunno how is the situation in my country, but I did noticed when seeing broadcasts on public TVs (for example in bars and restaurants showing sports) that compression issues happen, decoding issues happen, and the whole thing is laggy, most obvious when you are seeing sports, during analog TV times, I would hear the cheers and fireworks after goals, victories and so on, all at same time, now I hear it staggered, with seemly poorer people cheering first, I assume because they have analog TVs and radios.
> On the other hand, when you get a solid signal the picture is amazing versus the standard-def of analog broadcasts. Add to this the benefit of multiple sub-channels on each broadcast channel and you get a lot more watching options.
Subchannels is kind of nice, but junky content with junky compression is worse than a more limited set of snowy channels. Now, when they do broadcast stuff with enough bandwidth, and you're above the cliff the whole time, it's nice.
> Mainstream broadcast TV, for myself in the UK, has been dead for about a decade
OK, I'm not in the UK. However, I always like to defy conventional wisdom that everyone knows, and that is certainly some of it.
Broadcast TV is digital now, in the US at least. An antenna will cost you $50-75 or so, it's tiny, and if you have line-of-sight with the tower, you get a perfect picture. It will be in 4K soon, supposedly.
What's on? Well, sports, if you like that. I watched the US v. Netherlands match yesterday on broadcast. All the big college football games were on yesterday. If you don't watch sports, then yeah, there's not much.
Still: local news, much better than you find on the web. And PBS stations. And ancient TV shows, e.g. Frasier, Taxi. It doesn't replace streaming, but it IS free.
A long time ago, before Analogue Terrestrial TV (OTA) was replaced by Digital broadcasts in the UK, I was visiting a friend in Amsterdam. I was surprised to discover that she was watching BBC television. The signal was strong enough to be received in Amsterdam, and I often wonder if this is why the Dutch are historically better at English because they watched so many British TV shows.
I remember old "snowy" tv and absolutely hated it. Bad analog is still a really bad experience, especially with audio. Worse, it never seems to be just "snowy" but the signal goes in and out randomly so it goes from bad to unwatchable quickly and somehow always during important parts of the show. ;) I think people tend to play up idealized versions of analog tv and downplay how bad digital signal issues can be, a bit like how people hold up questionable movie special effects from the 70s and 80s as being great but also think all CGI is fake looking.
I don't think asking people to run a proper antenna is asking too much, especially for all the benefits digital brings in.
That's not true in some ways, TV requires a huge number of transmitters and is limited to a few channels, where the internet has a virtually infinite number of channels.
Even now it's digital here in the UK I believe each of the 5(?) muxes can only support tens of channel each.
Airwaves TV might scale easily but can only send a proportionally small amount of information, but the internet send a vastly larger amount of data per second, but struggles when everyone wants the same data at once.
Our analogue signal was switched off and despite having a digital ready TV we've not watched telly since. Spending license money on DVD rentals from the library instead.
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