INFROMANT - essay by Freon
The Year We Lose Contact
Have to rant for a moment - sorry to go all futurist on you.
Sure signs that Radio Concentration has already claimed your broadcast area as a victim:
1) Common street names like Bunert and Schoenherr are pronounced BUNNERT and SHOW-NAR.
2) Ads that you hear when you're out of state that sound identical but have local terms and places dubbed in
4) Morning shows that read the newspaper and cnn.com at you instead of writing items themselves
5) Songs coming in several remixes to fit the demographics of differing stations under the corporate umbrella
6) Money. Prizes. Ticket giveaways to sold-out concerts.
7) Memorable Beer Commercials.
Y'know, friends, we're doomed. Sorry. That's in the past - and look now at the telly of the future:
-=2010=1984=-
The big 'news' being that communities are protesting the second-rate status that cable is giving them by making public access television viewers use rf-converters to be able to view content on HDTVs which don't support analog cable/broadcast anymore. Viewers Pissed about Taking it Up the Spectrum(sic)
Of course, Comcast HAS to comply (oh dear) by taking CATV into their pipeline (for a fee), and leaving the community with NO NEED FOR BROADCAST TVs and therefore NO BALANCED MEDIUM, beginning the moment the last television hits the curb. Duh. Sorry - that's what you get for buying what your government tells you to buy. Or what Sony tells your government to tell you to buy. Get the picture? It's not news. It's fallout. Community access has swallowed. We're on our own.
Why complain? Analog cell phones are finished as of this year. XMRadio is somehow still here against all reason, and as I've mentioned, Broadcast Radio is already rotted at the roots. I'm on a pulpit built by AT&T Broadband, and I can already see the death of dialup from here.
And you can quote me on that.Smart people will always have public access, minimum requirement tools and freedom of information. Too bad we're running out of all four.
In 2010, everyone else just HAS to be satisfied with Coors, Fox 'News' and their next president - all chosen for them by that trusted one percent of the voting population, incorporated. What's scary? They ARE.
On Friday night, I bring NBC's broadcast of Orwell's classic, prophetic fiction '1984' with David Niven - 12am on RFF. Crack open a Blue and enjoy. ;-)
freon, doing his part by keeping the rabbit ears
LONG LIVE THE FIGHTERS-RADIO FREE ANYTHING
Freon is Canadian. If he's too loud we can deport him.
Labels: essay
4 Comments:
INFROMANT is not a typo. It's what you find on the back of a device that DOES support broadcast analog television.
Why don't DVD players have this? Why haven't they had this? Why haven't they had this for years? Because the plan has been in place for that long.
The most ironic thing happened yesterday. I was at Best Buy yesterday and saw a rack of Sony Walkman units with those FCC warning stickers on them.
This television receiver has only an analog broadcast tuner and will require a converter box after February 17, 2009, to receive over-the-air broadcasts with an antenna because of the Nation’s transition to digital broadcasting. Analog-only TVs should continue to work as before with cable and satellite TV services, gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD players, and similar products.
Okay, let's be serious. The sticker is bigger than the package for the product. Go look. It's hysterical.
Also, the 'converter' in question would cost twice that of this Walkman, and since the Walkman has an internal antenna, where the hell would you plug it in?
Third insult: The device is a TV AUDIO device. It doesn't even make use of broadcast TV.
I was tempted to buy both this and the converter, and go to the installation desk to have them put them together for me so I could listen to Broadcast TV after Feb next year. Har Har!
This is of course impossible. But there's the product, on the shelf still for sale, though next year fully 30% of its usefulness will be gone in the USA.
Why should I complain, says Sony - I can buy a NW-A919 ($425) instead.
Which brings me to the real point: why are these still for sale?
Because the more warning stickers we see, the easier it will be to believe we'll be better off without broadcast.
Yeah.
"Verizon bid $9.4 billion and AT&T $6.6 billion in the FCC sale of rights to airwaves now used for analog TV broadcasts. Those airwaves will become available with the completion of the conversion to digital broadcasts next year. These government-owned airwaves are considered prime real estate on the radio spectrum because of their ability to penetrate walls and send signals farther using less power."
Great. So now if we use these channels we're not simply breaking Federal law, we're TRESPASSING.
Next, exposed arials will draw cops like CB antennas drew State Troopers in the 80's.
Countdown to the Digital Rapture (Infromant 2)
Next week the big changeover to digital television begins; one third of the full-power TV stations in the US are planning to switch at that time. Budget problems notwithstanding, progress marches on. Or does it?
I have it on good authority (well, my neighbor who went and got a converter) that going digital is painless and worth it. The picture quality and range of content is immense, and all that stuff. But am I the only curmudgeon about this? I simply don't think it was a good idea to switch.
The reasons aren't obvious because the advantages are so clear and most people I know can't wait to show me their nifty big flatscreen TV blah blah blah. But hey, here's a question for you. Do you remember a time when you had a device that could actually be repaired when it broke down? Those 30-inch CRT tellies lining the streets of this country could. They always could. And time was, a lot of them were made in Michigan.
At my repair shop one time we switched from an analog oscilloscope to a digital one, which made up for its extra cost with diagnostic doodads and tutorials. But the scope? It STUNK! It was something like three frames per second - versus realtime waveforms on the old scope. Perhaps this one switch to digital really stung me. But am I being paranoid? Hm.
In a time of serious trouble for the global economy, where will you take that 60-inch panel to be fixed if something happens? Is there ever going to be a cottage industry for repairing these things? Will you be able to afford the cost of repair? Will the store you bought it from (or the cable company, or half of the content providers) be in business next month? Sorry, but I don't need to rely on uninterrupted shipping from South Korea to sustain my entertainment fix.
The four horsemen of the technological apocalypse:
Futility (or fashion). This is the spirit of replacing something
because it's out of style.
Outsourcing. Design it, make it, dispose of it somewhere else.
Irreparability. Broken? Cheaper to buy a new one.
Marketing. Tell everyone it's worth the extra cost even when it isn't.
These trends are creeping up everywhere, from clothes to houses. For toys like cars, phones and computers and television, it's mostly already here, and the final insult is that come June, 17 percent of US households will STILL not be ready. They will be 'left behind'. More, in fact, because stations need to 'see the light' too - new transmission hardware and cameras for starters. So at least 17%.
Hm. Okay so 17% of households in Oklahoma will not know a tornado watch when they really need to, next time.
But hey, look on the bright side! Of the 99 broadcast channels you'll get with this new flashy stuff, you probably won't need to surf hard for news; network ownership concentration has already guaranteed that since you'll only see about five 'truly independent' views of the world from your set *wherever you look* [NewsCorp, Viacom, Disney, Vivendi and AOL/Time/Warner], at least you'll be reasonably sure of a balanced medium.
Not!
Until the first DIGITAL pirate television station hits the air, I personally have no faith in this circus.
There are good federal regs and there are bad ones. The one that mandated unleaded fuel to keep our groundwater clean? Good. Expensive, and at the time largely misunderstood by the public, but in the long run we all coped (a new exhaust system used to cost about sixty bucks before 1973. It's now about seven hundred including a catalyst).
My idea of a bad federal reg is one that makes it impossible to KEEP legacy technology and the support for it locally available at a fair price, and has us lining the streets with perfectly good, unwanted non-cable ready CRTs. I hope the local recycling center can handle the flood.
Examples of how it CAN be done are AM/FM combination radios, and better yet the huge number of telephone networks right now, in the form of DSL over landline telephone. Keep your answering machine, keep your rotary phone, and enjoy the web on top of all that. Now THAT's a utility I find worth the money. All it needs is a little more support in the 'do-not-call list' department.
Why isn't there something like this for TV? Perhaps because Sony, LG and Samsung are perfectly happy making digital-ready sets that cannot be fixed in the United States of America? Perhaps because the five conglomerates above couldn't be happier to help us get on-demand more-wired-than-not content into our brains?
Such nice, clean, smooth brains.
And we were all fashionable/FORTUNate enough to get a converter box when they had them, and piss on the 17 percent. How terribly American.
Like I'd said earlier, the jig is up. If you want the content at all, you will have to settle for the ways and means they've set out for you - and mark my words there is a definite THEY here. I just don't feel comforted by this new kind of control.
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ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,FREON,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø
http://michiganfandom.org
"There must have been a moment,
In the beginning when we could have said no.
Somehow we missed it.
We'll know better next time."
~Guildenstern
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