Why has U.S. television gone digital? Have you ever gotten a satisfactory answer to that question? The vista of homes festooned with rooftop antennas that became an icon of modern culture in the 1950s is about to become a thing of the past. It should not have surprised anyone that the transition to digital has not been smooth, and there has already been one postponement. My own somewhat bumpy journey with digital began when a roofer told me that I would have to remove my rooftop antenna because the bolts attaching the antenna to the roof’s parapet were compromising the building’s waterproof envelope. That was disappointing. I have stubbornly refused to subscribe to a cable outlet, and my television reception using the antenna on the roof was perfect. I have always been content to limit my viewing to what was available over the airwaves. Now what to do? I decided that it would be worth a try to just put a splitter on the cable that feeds my broadband internet connection. I am not sure this is entirely legal, but it works just fine, and I found that I was getting NY1 and C-Span as a bonus, two stations that are not typically accessible via a rooftop antenna.
The next phase in this saga came about as a result of my deciding to buy an HDTV, a High Definition television set. At first, I was dazzled by the incredible resolution and deep color that the new set provided. In addition, the tuner in the HD set brought in many more channels than the tuner in my old Sony. In fact, I got a little nervous when I found that I was getting movie channels and documentary channels that only cable provides. My splitter arrangement looked more like theft of services. Within a very short time, however, those premium channels began to disappear. I could only conclude that they had some way of filtering out stuff you had to pay for when they discovered that deadbeats were getting a free ride. Actually, I felt a little better each time one of the so-called premium channels went black. A movie buff, I could not resist watching free junk that I would never have laid down hard cash for in a movie house. The cable company’s vigilance saved me from my darker self.
The longer I live with my new HDTV, the more questions it raises. Let’s start with the technology. You will find, if you haven’t already, that when you auto-program an HDTV, your new TV set has become the receptacle for numerous shopping channels, infomercial channels, evangelical Christian channels and a vast additional array of what can only be called junk television. In addition, the HD tuner brings in a high definition broadcast of many of the major channels as well as what is called a normal cable broadcast. This apparent redundancy acknowledges the fact that not all television stations have the capacity—or the budget—to broadcast in high definition, thus not all cable transmissions are high definition transmissions. The large corporate networks, namely CBS, NBC and ABC, (as well as PBS), have obviously taken pains to showcase HD at its best. Look at a news broadcast or a flagship late night talk show or, God knows, a sporting event, and the quality of the picture is nothing short of dazzling. Resolution and focus are perfect. The picture virtually shines. Cranky types who still play LP records and could never adjust to the alleged “coldness” of CDs will no doubt complain that this new digital technology is too perfect. Most of the rest of us will probably ooh and aah.
On the other hand, if you are watching a digital broadcast in anything other than the HD mode, you will find that the picture quality is absolutely terrible. In fact, it is far worse than the quality of the picture I was enjoying with my rooftop antenna. Even on the big networks, proudly broadcasting their most popular shows in glitzy HD, picture quality is more often than not inferior to transmissions sent out via the airwaves.
Yet another “new and improved” product that is clearly inferior to the original? Obviously, there is digital and then there is digital. Much of what one squints at on a new HDTV has about as much production value as a picture taken on your cell phone or a low level Youtube transmission. Now, I am sure that government and the corporations will assure us that things will get better as more and more HD cameras are used and more stations begin to broadcast in HD, that this is a still developing technology. Maybe. But, for me, there is a far more important issue than picture quality that the move to exclusively digital broadcasting raises—thought control.
This was brought home to me during one of PBS’s ever more frequent fund raisers. A spokesman for PBS stated that one of the reasons they were short of money this year—in addition (of course) to congressional cuts—was that they felt a need to continue to broadcast over the airwaves for a while so that they could reach their whole audience through the transition period. It would cost Public Television an additional 21 million dollars to continue to use their analog transmitters. At this juncture, I recalled images from my childhood in the days of radio when I looked at pictures of antennas with fret lines emanating from them to represent their transmissions, when boys on home-made short-wave radios could put an antenna on the roof and communicate with the whole world. The airwaves. What a wonderful ring that word has! The people own the airwaves. That has a wonderful ring, too. I wonder…just who has the capacity to make digital transmissions? How long will it be before all those remaining rooftop antennas disappear? And when they do disappear, what will that mean for the free flow of information?
If you would like a lesson in the transparency of our democracy, just try finding out what the rationale was for the digital transition. Of course, the stated rationale—put out there for children—is that we will all get better quality pictures on our TV sets. Try to penetrate the deeper arguments, however, and issues of national security begin to appear with great frequency. Even if digital transmission did allow for better picture quality, when did the Reagan era governments of the last thirty years show similar enthusiasm for issuing mandates to private enterprise? The bottom line question raised by all of this is: why did broadcasters need to cease their analog, over the airwaves transmissions?
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