Sunday, May 16, 2010

Bye-bye TV

Over the air TV was converted to digital last year. That means plain old TV sets with rabbit ears do longer work. You have have cable, or a converter box ($50 now) or a nice new TV set.
Visited my daughter last weekend. As a modern art sculpture, they have three old no longer functional TV sets piled up artistically in the dining room. That house no longer does TV. They have broadband Internet but no cable TV.
I'll bet the TV networks didn't see that one coming when they were pushed on board the high def digital TV bandwagon a few years ago. In effect, the switch to high def digital has reduced the TV audience, partly from people not converting, and also because the new high def digital signal doesn't go very far. Where I am we used to get 8 over-the-air TV stations. Now that we went all digital, we only get one station over-the-air. That's seven TV stations with a smaller viewership.

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