It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
The NTSC specification is pretty thick. And if you don't follow it to a 't', you won't be selling that set in the US. Every country does this. It's to make sure you don't get competing television standards. This has been going on since just after the dawn of TV. The initial introduction of TV had all sorts of competing TV standards on the market, none of which were compatible. Pretty soon the gubmint stepped in and dictated which one was going to be used in order to make sure that the consumers didn't have to have two or three different sets to receive all the programming in their area.
Originally posted by goosdawg
Starting Jan. 1, 2008, all U.S. households will be eligible to request up to two $40 coupons to be used toward the purchase of up to two, digital-to-analog converter boxes, while the initial $990 million allocated for the program is available.
Source | NTIA
Personally, I'd rather see our tax dollars go to ensure adequate health care coverage for America's children, but I suppose the Government knows what's in their, I mean, our, best interests.
Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
The gubmint mandates a LOT of things when it comes to communications. With TV, it's all the way down to super-picky technical details of how that TV signal is structured.
Hell, as a TV designer you can't even choose your own IF frequencies, they're spelled out as well.
Originally posted by stumason
It's about money, both making more of it (Governments with the "sale" of wavelengths and companies with the use of them) and making what you already have go further, by reducing costs.
Originally posted by RedGolem
Stumason,
Glad we can agree that it is about the money. But the thing is it is not reducing costs for the consumer. The consumer is going to have to go out and purchase new tv sets sooner or later if they want to have one in the home. Similar things have happened in the past, now its happening with tv sets. So far as im concerned this will be the biggest conspiracy, in terms of money, that the consumer will have to spend just to keep getting a signal.
Originally posted by BlueRaja
reply to post by jpm1602
The urgency is that it just doesn't make sense to sell something that will be incompatible with the broadcast format, in the same sense that you don't see any new 8 Track players being manufactured.
In the fall of 1964, late at night in a dark laboratory in Southern California, William Powell Lear gave birth to the 8-track tape. Bill Lear, glamour boy and eccentric scientific genius, a man who was on the verge of unleashing the amazing and mighty Learjet on the world and making then losing so much money it would drive him and his entire family nuts, created the endless loop tape cartridge. Right away, Bill Lear got on the phone to RCA who agreed to provide music from their vast library and Ford would offer the Lear Stereo Eight in its Lincolns, Galaxie LTDs and Thunderbirds...
....Bill Lear's younger son, John, also highly honored and regarded in the aviation world, is now a noted UFOlogist and publically states that on April 30, 1964, the aliens agreed to provide technology and we agreed to overlook the abductions, the messing up of our cattle, crop circles and whatever other sinister stuff they wanted to do. John Lear was written out of his father's will.