Television is headed the way of the Green Lawn and the Public Library. Mark your calendars, February 17, 2009 will be the day that broadcast TV dies. Personally, I’m not going to mourn the loss, attend the funeral, or even send flowers.
It will also be the day that cable and satellite companies will begin to discover that they have out smarted themselves by using their ownership of the United States Government to perpetuate the DTV fraud upon WE-THE-PEOPLE.
Bush will have screwed the cable and satellite companies as royally as he did the Christian Right when he hustled them for faith-based funds! Bush-Cheney-Rove and the Chinese, South Koreans, and Japanese probably promised the North Koreans a cut of the manufacture and sale of DTV converter boxes and DTVs to American consumers in exchange for a video of a North Korean nuclear cooling tower implosion!
And watch … the conversion to DTV will go about as smoothly as a FEMA response to Katrina. Obama will be inaugurated on January 20, 2009 and the Republican-planted I.E.D. (Improvised Explosive Device/Roadside bomb) known as ‘DTV’ is set to detonate less than 30-days later on Feb. 17, 2009. It’ll be a bigger political headache for the new Prez than trying to find a graceful way to default on campaign promises to get our ‘combat’ troops out of Iraq.
Oh sure, broadcast TV was already dying a slow death and DTV will just speed up the inevitable. But, I think the cable and satellite companies will have shot themselves in the foot in the process of lobbying for its early demise.
This is similar to what will happen when Corporate book sellers like, Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, etc are finally able to drive a stake through the heart of our public libraries [& 10 Reasons Why the Internet is no Substitute for a Library].
When the need for ever bigger corporate executive bonuses are at stake the funds have got to come from somewhere … and there are fewer and fewer Commons left for the American taxpayer and consumers which have not already been plundered for the sake of privatizing everything for corporate profits. The public airwaves are only the most current example. Being able to read a book based upon our libraries being part of the Commons, subsidized by our taxes dollars, will be the next target of the Corporatocracy, and the anti-tax, Kool-Aid sipping, geniuses.
The FCC’s web site has already become little more than marketing collateral for their handlers from the Corporatocracy. Little more than commercial advertising for the pitch that DTV is all about a better TV viewing experience for WE-THE-PEOPLE. In truth, DTV is little more than a damn nuisance for the average American who has been perfectly happy with their old analog TV. DTV has everything to do with forcing the broadcast TV holdouts to SUBSCRIBE to cable or satellite delivery of TV signals.
No more freebies … there are corporate executive bonuses to be paid, after all; corporate profits to be made! Corporate marketeers can’t afford to let literally hundreds of thousands of potential cable /satellite subscriptions go untapped … they are going to FORCE us to pay-up whether we want to or not; that’s their thinking. In order to do that they must eliminate the final, competing, option available to WE-THE-PEOPLE. And sadly, WE-THE-PEOPLE have bought into their marketing onslaught; we’ve gone along for the ride; we have been drinking the Kool-Aid.
I was perfectly happy with my 15+ year old Toshiba 27” analog TV. Heck, I didn’t even bother to replace it when its tired, old picture tube developed a permanent line through the upper 25% of the viewable area of its screen! I got used to it; ignored it; didn’t notice it anymore; been watching it that way for years! That being said, just how important do you suppose that the gubbermint sales pitch of a ‘better’ DTV picture has been to my viewing pleasure? Newsflash: I couldn’t care less.
TV sets have become like green lawns. Being concerned with having the greenest, most weed-less lawn, or the most technologically advanced TV on the block is ‘so yesterday’. Have you seen that ‘Round-up’ commercial that is a parody of an old west gunfight between two quick draw artists, on a suburban sidewalk? Two suburbanite neighbors act out an old west gun fight using bottles of weed spray instead of six-shooters. Those Ads could only appeal to boomers my age and older who grew-up watching things like ‘Gunsmoke’ and ‘Have Gun Will Travel’ on black and white TVs. Most of us are too old or too tired to mow a lawn anymore, or are on fixed incomes and couldn’t afford the gas for a weed whacker anyway. Those that still care, or can afford it, hire illegal immigrant landscapers to tend their lawn.
Besides, we can’t afford to waste the water or pollute the planet with the chemicals and fertilizer for our lawns. Main Stream Media TV pollutes our brains in a similar way. Get MIRO instead.
In the ‘hoods around Las Vegas and other arid parts of the country, new developments use landscaping that doesn’t even use lawn grass. As the failed Republican economic policies continue to thrust us into a bloodless civil war fought between the haves and the have-nots, lawns will be converted to vegetable gardens out of the necessity to eat, anyway!
In the midst of hard times, the last thing folks want or need is a new TV widget! I’ve converted one analog TV and I’m here to tell ya, the advantages are heavily outweighed by the aggravation and the inconveniences. If you haven’t done it yet, don’t bother. Procrastinate, just like most of us do when it comes to April 15th. Wait until Feb. 17, 2009 at midnight. Squeeze the last your analog TV has to give before surrendering to the inevitable.
DTV is like computer technology, especially software … it is better to wait and let others forge ahead onto the ‘bleeding-edge’. Let the early-adopters work the kinks out first, so-to-speak. You don’t want to be the first kid on your block to convert an analog TV to DTV. Trust me, I’ve done it. The joint forces of your Federal government and the main stream media troops of the Corporatocracy are trying to brainwash WE-THE-PEOPLE with the constant barrage of so-called ‘Public Service Announcements [PSA(s)]. The dark-side wants us convinced that they’ve just done something noble for the great unwashed masses. PSA(s) peddle how the bandwidth being freed up is going to help police and fire services be more efficient, because no one could object to such causes ... now all we gotta do is wait to see just how long that will take to occur, if ever. Sorta like those Homeland Security funds that most are still waiting to receive.
BUT, if you are going to continue to watch television, and most will, you’ll suffer less aggravation, and fewer remotes by simply surrendering your perfectly-good old iron for new TV(s) with digital capabilities built in rather than go the converter box route. That is just the conclusion that the Corporatocracy was hoping we’d all arrive at!
The Corporatocracy hates for us to buy 'stuff' that actually outlasts the warranty period and doesn't require a monthly subscription fee. The Corporatocracy would ultimately like to find a way to make us all have to subscribe to the air we breath; elect John McCain for Bush's 3rd term, and they'll probably come up with a way to do that too.
With DTV you'll need to prepare yourselves for built-in lag time when changing channels, some ‘issues’ with bad syncing between audio and video, the occasional dropped/no signals, and the need for a new and different antenna to try to alleviate those new problems. Problems none of the Public Service Announcements bother to mention … much less the local Worst-Buy, or Rat-Shack salespersons pitching the converters and DTVs.
Ask yourself too, where are all of those millions of discarded analog TVs are going to land? In landfills, or barges back to China to be recycled into inferior plastic and electronic products to sell back to us at a profit? All in the name of 'multicasting' and digital picture quality? Sheez.
If you do opt for a DTV converter box, you’ll discover that your choices have been limited by the participating retailers who typically settle on only a single make and model to carry. The nearest Best Buy carried only the Chinese made ‘Insignia’ private labeled for Best Buy. It comes with a remote that it claims can also power your TV. I couldn’t get that feature to work as advertised, so now I need to keep two remotes handy. It also claimed that I’d have the option of using either of two cabling arrangements to connect it to my TV. But, I was only able to get one of those options to function, even after trying it with various brands of TV, etc.
Despite this supposedly being newer technology, the converter box I ended up with has an LED pilot lamp that never goes off unless the unit is unplugged from the wall. When in the off position that one LED remains on, glowing red (blue when on). Do we really need a red light to tell us when shit is off now!? So much for going green.
I ultimately got the damn thing connected and semi-functional, but I’ll be damned if I can see any benefit yet. At least none to justify the interruption/aggravation. Maybe it’s the fact that now I can receive my local PBS broadcast on 4 or 5 channels instead of 1 (multicasting)! It looks like maybe one of those channels lets ya watch gourmet cooking shows 24/7 … let’s just hope none of their recipes use tainted tomatoes or stinky beef (funny picture on that stinky beef link ... imagine that dude in the picture sniffing a slab of American beef to see it it is good ... that from Koreans that eat Kimchi, which is veggies they bury in the earth to ferment ... mmmmm, yum ... after that how would they know how anything is supposed to smell?) and that those cooking shows donate their left-overs to the local food banks whose shelves are empty!
RESOURCES:
http://www.solidsignal.com/cat_display.asp?main_cat=03&CAT=Digital%20Converter%20Boxes
http://antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx
http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/S-p2kPYiBqeEO/learningcenter/home/antenna.html?page=1
http://www.opb.org/digital/
http://reviews.cnet.com/4321-6487_7-6613951.html
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"Knowledge about government is power" --GovTrack
Hell, Obama beats McCain at every damn thing!
McCain is so desperate as to resort to bold-face lying to WE-THE-PEOPLE. Apparently he thinks that if he does it while out of the country Americans will remain uninformed and won’t notice:
Republicans Coolidge and Hoover brought us the Great Depression. With Republican’ts Bush-Cheney-McCain history repeats itself.
John McCain is a pathetic hypocrite and flip-flopper. That old fool will say and do ANYTHING to try to get elected including renaming the practice of 'Swift Boating' to read 'Truth Squad'. Calling something the exact opposite is a tired, old, Rove ploy that the electorate is sick and tired of seeing and hearing. This is yet another way in which McCain is nothing more than the 3rd-term of the Bush administration. 
