Would someone please tell me why this is so important and a "necessity?" What exactly is the point of the whole thing besides better picture? I would like to hear other opinions and views. Personally, I believe it to be a bad thing. It can and probably will be used for downright manipulation of the viewer. Not much of a change now that I think about it, but LCD imagery creates an almost hypnotic, trance-like state do to its life-likeness. It is so much more real it draws you in. Imagine what this could do in the hands of the wrong people? Hell, with digital editing and computer programs, we can be led to believe anything...It saddens me to think how much we have all become dependent on technology. I don't think some people could survive without it. It has dumbed us down, over-simplified everything. Makes me wonder if anyone in the future will remember what it is like to be human.
You can solve a part of the problem simply by using your digital converter to feed RF to a crappy old TV set. Solve the problem completely by turning the stupid thing off. Get your shortwave out of the bunker and listen to pure analog noise, or the ur-pure digital dit-dah-dits.
I fail to see why the digital signal I now get over the air is any different from what I see when I watch a DVD. It's a decent picture. No HD and blu-ray and all that stuff here, but I don't see why I should object to a decent picture!
Seriously, you say "what is the point other than a better picture," as if that were no point at all. A better picture would probably be a point by itself, considering how crappy the quality of American VHF has always been.
As it happens, though, I believe the main reason for the change is to free up the VHF bandwidth for other uses. VHF television has always occupied a very large part of the useable radio spectrum, and as technology improves, there's a need to find better uses for it. One of those uses, I have recently heard, might be public or municipal wireless internet access.
I think that as cable and satellite reception has so overtaken over-the-air in much of the country, and TV's themselves have evolved to take advantage of that, it was about time for the FCC to kill the old system. I think the transition itself has been poorly handled, but the idea is not so bad.
Just as a final note, you mention what could happen if the new technolgy were put into the hands of the "wrong people." What's new there? Technology has always been accessible to the wrong people, and used to its fullest. There's nothing special about digital TV, and nothing about over the air digital TV that has not already been available to cable and satellite providers, DVD makers, and internet providers. If you're that scared, you'd better not turn anything on at all.
One definite minus is, as Metal Thrasher points out, the loss of fringe reception with digital. Within a certain range, it's better, but beyond that, you can no longer pull in those snowy, jittery deep fringe signals. All the digital signals come by UHF, which has a shorter range than VHF to begin with, and digital signals simply cut off below a certain threshold. I suppose we must acknowledge that for the great majority of TV viewers, this is not the problem it once was, because so many people in fringe areas have simply switched to satellite, but it's kind of too bad anyway that some of that free access will be lost.
