more on Powell: Don't Rewrite Telecom Act

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Mike O'Dell <mo () ccr org>
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 09:25:25 -0500
To: <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Powell: Don't Rewrite Telecom Act



David Farber wrote:
> ------ Forwarded Message
> From: Bob Frankston

  The whole broadcast world is
> aimed at a shrinking audience that is still buying analog TVs.

actually the market is still heavily dominated by analog TVs.
EETimes just had a great article showing the market
decomposition.

it turns out that
people may buy one DTV-capable impressive TV for their
principle viewing couch, but then they buy half a dozen
analog TVs for all the other places they want them.
(bedrooms, kitchen, bathrooms, etc).  frankly they
don't give a whiz about it being digital or HD, what
they care about is cheapness because they buy in
quanity.

this has the interesting side-effect of putting all the power
in the hands of the cable-TV guys because their set-top-boxes
will allow the analog TVs to work perfectly well far, far into
the future after the point one cannot buy a new analog TV,
at least not in the US.  that will in turn produce an interesting
black market in foreign analog TVs to replace the ones you
can't buy in the US. What's that you say about PAL vs NTSC??
no  problem - the cable-TV set-top-box will happily generate
the analog output in whatever format you want if that's what
it takes.

so the net result is that forcing digital TV ends up dooming
over-air broadcast TV purely because of market dynamics.

 -mo


------ End of Forwarded Message


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