yep..digital tv...government makes law to steal more of our money

at least it's true here in the usa... i don't know if it's true anywhere else...

our government is making a law that says that digital tv is a must, and if u have analogue tv by feb. of 2009, u won't be able to receive a signal anymore. before then, we had a choice. now we don't. kinda makes me suspect as to why my analogue tv was getting less and less of a clear signal over the years, in the first place...and why my regular radio is getting less and less clear signals over time. right now, high definition radio is being offered as a choice, and is being heavily advertised, so, i think it's only a matter of time before the government follows suit on that, too. there are jocks who think there is no real benefit to high def radio, and i agree. soo.. i bet the government will 'do something about it', seeing as i bet hd is not selling well, or i bet that it would not be so heavily advertised.

what are your thoughts?(if you are experiencing this..and, for that matter, if you are not experiencing this)

I agree 100%.

this will happen soon in the UK and it makes sense to me as there's no point for us to pay tax on two different formats when only one of them, the superior one, can do the job and better. sure it means paying an extra $70 for a digital box if you haven't got one already but this is the future of public broadcasting against a redundant analogue system.

Same happening here. Think it goes all digital all over the country end of this year.
No particular thoughts actually, apart form a slight irritation that there are too few choices in what kind of channels you want ( you can shoose form a variety of sets, but my mother who is not interested in too many channels still has to pay for stuff she will never watch.........).
Same for me, as I tend to watch less TV, as I think its becomeing more and more the same. So that is actually my only complaint, I want to pay for only what I watch. i don`t want to put money into channels that just produce crap.

^ yeah but you still get the same free terrestrial channels that were on analogue before, right? that how it is here in the UK and we get more free channels. otherwise that would be a major rip-off.

We already have to have a digital box to watch tv. Without the box you're only able to watch black and white ants fighting together, which is not very intresting to watch in a long term lol. And not only that you had to buy the box, you'll have to have a separate box for every tv you own. So if you have 3 tv's and you want them all to work, you had to buy 3 digital boxes. Which is simply ridiculous.. The boxes haven't been working like they are supposed to work and there's have been a lot of problems.

I think it was something around 3000 people here that resigned their tv fee because of this "digital time".

I still haven't quite figured out all the things Im able to do with my digital box.. All I know is pretty much how to record programs to its hard disk and how to watch them afterwards lol.

movingcoolcat said:

Same happening here. Think it goes all digital all over the country end of this year.
No particular thoughts actually, apart form a slight irritation that there are too few choices in what kind of channels you want ( you can shoose form a variety of sets, but my mother who is not interested in too many channels still has to pay for stuff she will never watch.........).
Same for me, as I tend to watch less TV, as I think its becomeing more and more the same. So that is actually my only complaint, I want to pay for only what I watch. i don`t want to put money into channels that just produce crap.

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i agree...................

ontop of the licence fee to keep the bbc going. most ppl have freeeview or sky anyway so i doubt it will make much differecne. only for old ppl who dont have a clue about it and only watch the standard bbc and itv channels

movingcoolcat said:

I want to pay for only what I watch. i don`t want to put money into channels that just produce crap.

Click to expand...

Have you checked out iTunes, Amazon, and maybe even Netflix for your viewing needs? In this day and age, all you really need is at least a DSL connection - assuming you don't have any broadband cable options, and you can legally purchase high quality downloads of specific TV shows.

IMO, the only reason cable and satellite are still in business is because all of this technology as well as public usage of the internet is still in it's infancy...but I can see a world not too far down the line where people seriously ditch the conventions of cable and satellite television and just download everything on demand - just like what we've been doing with music for the past decade!

we will have this only in 2012, i heard in our news recently. by that time maybe an another system will come out again :lol:

It is happening in Australia too. The stations have been running their digital equivilants for a while now, usually with stuff you can't see on the analogue versions, like the ABC now has an ABC2 channel, so with a whole other roster of programming. Channel Ten just launced theirs this year.

I think our deadline has been pushed back a few times now, I think.... not 100% though it is now 2010.

More people are getting ready for it though, by buying the settop box or tv's which are equiped already. The quality of picture is brilliant if you have the right equipment.

I dont think its that big a deal.
They arent expensive at all so why should we worry about it? lol
The only thing thats gonna even slightly suck is the fact that i have to replace all 4 of my tvs. Hopefully u can just buy a converter otherwise its just gonna be really hard to find a place to get rid of my old ones.

Does anyone know, if I have a tv that I can connect my computer to and play dvd's from the computer to the tv, is that tv already able to accept a digital signal without the box? Where do you get the signal from? Is it a cable? I don't have cable tv. I currently just receive the signal via an antena.