Digital Television: It’s a Trap

My wife and I had been seeing the commercials for months. We were well aware that if we did not “upgrade our TV” by February 2009 that it “would stop working”.

Though the melodramatic commercials showed families using old televisions as flower pots and recycle bins, my wife and I were not amused. In fact we were, and are, outright angry that our preferred method of getting television would be cut off.

You see, my wife and I are both from the Internet generation. We’re of a mindset where spending $50 per month on high-speed Internet is a necessity, but spending just $15 on basic cable is a travesty and a waste of money.

However, you can hardly blame us, when your television viewing consists of a few episodes of Craig Ferguson, Leno’s headlines and maybe an episode or two of crime drama, we don’t really watch enough television to justify the expense.

But then I found out about a neat little Federal program that mails you credit card-like coupons for a digital converter. I decided to give it a try, only to find out that I had walked right into a trap.

Rough Beginnings

The first challenge was, strangely enough, finding a digital converter box. Supposedly, they were all over the place but a trip to no fewer than three electronics stores found them all sold out. One, which shall remain namely, had one model left in stock but it was over $80, meaning our $40 coupon would not even cut the price in half.

Desperate, we read the letter that it came in and it said that a pharmacy a few blocks from our house carried them. We were confused as to why a drug store would have electronics but, since it was quite literally on the way home, we decided to give it a shot.

There we found what El Guapo would describe as a “plethora” of converters (Warning: Obscure reference in sentence). They literally had dozens in stock because they hadn’t sold a single one. We were the first to ask for one or even mention it in their store.

So while we had our hands on the box almost immediately, leaving the store was almost impossible because none of the cashiers, nor even the manager, knew how to ring up the thing or use the coupon. In the end, it took 20 minutes of waiting, ten dollars out of pocket, three cashiers, the manager and even a few customers to figure it out. In the meantime, two kids had robbed the place and an old man had died while waiting for his heart medicine, but at least we had our converter box.

The Alleged Benefits

If you listen to the commercials and proponents of DTV, they are quick to spout off a series of ways that DTV is better than analog. They include the following:

1. More channels: In my area, we were told, DTV would raise our channel count from four or five to seventeen.
2. Clearer Picture: No static or noise, just perfectly clear image.
3. High Definition: DTV is capable of high-def television where analog is not.
4. New Features: A more “cable-like” experience with pop up displays, program information, etc.
5. Stopping the Annoying DTV Commercials: Ok, this one wasn’t promised to me by anyone, but it seemed logical that, once I got DTV, people would stop reminding me to upgrade.

However, after racing home and hooking up our new converter box, we realized that most of these benefits were actually drawbacks.After we got over the giddy excitement of our new toy, we started immediately wanting our old setup back.

Why? To make it simple, let’s take the benefits one at a time.

More Channels

Indeed we did gain more channels, up to the aforementioned 17. However, most of those channels are a complete waste. Of the notable channels we received they include:

1. A gospel channel where the volume is always 50% higher than the other channels.
2. Two 24-hour local news channels that just replays previous newscasts over and over again.
3. A local weather channel that has appearances from the fourth-string weathermen.
4. A Spanish language channel, which is strangely difficult to flip away from.
5. A tech channel with only two actual shows that I’ve counted.

Out of all the new channels we got the only one that is worth anything to us is Qubo, the children’s channel. However, I’ll cover more on that later.

All in all, we stick to the same four channels we always did. If even that.

Clearer Picture

The “clearer picture” is the greatest lie of all. Sure, there’s no static in the line but that is because, when it comes to DTV, you either have the signal or you don’t. If the signal fades even the smallest bit, rather than getting a little bit of static, you get dropped like a Sprint phone call.

Sure, static is annoying and the picture is much better when it works, but it is almost routine for the audio to cut out, the picture to stop moving and, most annoying of all the “Singal too weak” box to pop up on my screen.

In short, rather than a little fuzz, I feel like I’m watching online video on a slow Internet connection without a good popup blocker. Every time that box pops up, I get a little bit closer to throwing a wrench through the screen.

High Definition

There are two problems with this. First, most channels are not HDTV yet, especially the new ones. Second, if you don’t have an HDTV, much like us, you have to choose who to downgrade your image to make it fit. You can either stretch it so that it looks pinched or letterbox it so that it doesn’t fill your whole screen.

For better or worse, we chose the latter.

So rather than getting a higher definition image, we’re actually stuck with a much smaller and much less clear one than when we started. Since most people who can afford an HDTV can also afford cable, I don’t really see how most antenna users win in this exchange.

New Features

The new features are pretty cool but are also pretty useless. For every channel that has its information correctly filled out, at least two have “regularly scheduled programming” for all of its shows. Though the pop ups and information dialogs are pretty cool, until they’re better supported there won’t be much that we can do with them.

Furthermore, most of the new features are geared toward checking and improving your signal strength, or rather, watching it trickle into the “weak” area as your show begins to stutter and stop.

Stopping the Annoying DTV Commercials

I was hopeful about this one and I had my hopes dashed hard. The commercials, crawlers and other annoying reminders to upgrade your TV don’t stop when you actually updgrade our TV. They’re still there, just as prominent as ever, and just as annoying.

Right now, I just hope they actually go away in February.

Antenna Troubles

photo credit: dsearls

The most frustrating part of our DTV experience has been getting and keeping a solid signal. When we bought the converter box we were told that our current antenna would work fine and that our only investment would be just the ten dollars we paid for the difference between the coupon and the converter cost.

However, when we got home, we found that to not be the case. None of the channels, including those we received very clearly before, worked for longer than five minutes without that annoying “weak signal” popup.

Thinking that perhaps we did actually need a DTV antenna, we went out and bought a cheap one for about $10. Though this doubled our investment, it still seemed reasonable.

But while things did improve, only certain channels came in consistently and even they occasionally lost signal. We put up with this for over a month before breaking down and buy a much more expensive amplified antenna, this one about $40.

Fortunately, this new antenna seems to work reasonably well, only a few channels now show any problems, but it still doesn’t work as well or as consistent as the old analog system. Worse still, even with the government-supplied coupon, we’ve made over $60 in purchased. Not a lot, to be certain, but still enough for about five months of cable.

It’s a Trap!

Somewhere between the popups, the extra purchases and the idiot cashiers, it hit me, DTV was not created for our benefit as consumers.

If DTV were a truly superior technology, we would have been able to adopt it on our own terms. TV stations could have brought transmitters online and made business decisions about when to deactivate the analog ones. There would be no government coupon program, no hard deadline, nothing. We would all be able to evaluate and transition as we saw fit.

No, government greed is written all over this. Not only did they make billions selling the old analog spectrum to the highest bidder, far more than they’ll spend on the new rebate program, they get to collect taxes from the electronics sold.

Worse still, this whole plan feels as if it is custom-made to drive me to either cable or satellite TV. Though I seriously doubt the government is gaining anything by supporting those industries, it wouldn’t shock me if some cable company lobbying dollars went toward the new initiative.

After all, everyone wins in this game. The government gets to sell the new spectrum, electronics makers get to market converters, cable companies get new customers and TV stations get to broadcast new channels with junk content and tons of ads.

The only people who lose with DTV are the consumers. We waste money to get an inferior version of something that previously was free.

Conclusions

For me, I am seriously debating hanging up my TV watching hat completely. I don’t watch enough hours to justify cable and the frustration of DTV is almost enough to drive me even further into books and the Web.

Granted, I’m not exactly the kind of viewer television hangs its hat on, but it would be nice if television showed me that it cared just a little bit. I feel like I’m being shoved out the door much like Ron White. Instead of being treated as a potential customer, I’m being treated like I broke some kind of imaginary rule.

So I guess we’ll see. Time will only tell what happens in the strange relationship between myself and TV.

It would just be sad if it was over only because i was too cheap for her…