Analog TV: Longer Life?
Scoble makes an excellent point about Analog TV, and the plans to get rid of it:
there are way too many people who still own analog TVs. My dad is one of them. He’s using a TV that I bought him back when I worked at LZ Premiums back in the 1980s. He’d like to get a new HD TV, but he comes from a generation that doesn’t throw things away just because a better one comes along. Not to mention that his house isn’t setup for a big screen. Oh, and older people vote, and vote more often than younger people. He also has a lot more resources than my generation does — resources that can go into getting heard.
The thing about voting patterns alone will make a huge difference. As well, for all the buzz about HD tv (and yes, I have an HD capable TV) - getting HD set up is complicated - more complicated than an awful lot of people (regardless of age bracket) want to deal with.
A small anecdote on that - I was at the dentist a few weeks ago, and while my daughter was getting checked, I chatted with two older ladies in the waiting area. DVRs? Something they had vaguely heard of, but had no interest in. I explained the idea to them, and it just sounded like too much work to them - they didn't even have DVD players (never mind Blu-Ray or HD DVD). There's an awful lot of that out there, and a lot of the people pushing home theaters just don't understand how widespread the confusion is.
Another anecdote: twenty years ago, you could walk into anyone's home, and change channels on the TV easily. Now? There are families where only 1 or 2 people understand the setups in every room in their own house. If my in-laws come over, we don't even try to explain the setup in the family room (which has the big TV). We just switch to the raw feed (the one which has no DVRs attached) so as to not create havoc or embarrassment.
Comments
Maaaaaatlock!
[George Paci] February 20, 2007 1:33:15.479
Sorry, couldn't resist.
On another note, it's not just little old ladies who don't care about HDVDRayDef on a 1600" flat screen. I'll be damned if I'm buying another TV before my eight-year-old thirty-inch breaks down -- and since it's Japanese, that might be in 2019. And a combination of my wife's principled stand against paying for programming and my proven addiction to the "educational" channels means we don't have cable or satellite service (perhaps the wrong word) either. The channel we watch most is NetFlix.
Finally, the bizarre user interfaces you get when you have more than one or two components are frankly ridiculous. Pretty much everything speaks IR these days, and a sophistimacated remote costs about $5 to manufacture, so there's no technical reason for it. The manufacturers would just have to get together to agree on a simple language for "TV turn on", "TV get input from DVD", "TV change the flipping channel", and we could put the nightmare behind us. (Jeez, even my Universal Remote lacks a way to flip between VCR/TV and DVD on the combination device -- I can't even control two measly boxes completely from one remote!)
I have a feeling as soon as the Linux crowd starts thinking about what a media-controlling computer done right would look like, we'll see some instant progress on this front. Maybe a little IR emitter taped to the receiver for each of your components, wired to a little computer, which takes orders from a single, simple remote control -- making every single button on the remote programmable to do what you actually want, and letting thousands of people share their programs for it freely.
Now that I think about it, if I actually cared about it, I could probably rig something like that up in a few weekends. Now that I really think about it, I should just search the web to see how many projects already do that....