Paul's Down-Home Page

Bob Thompson asks what’s going to happen with digital TV in 2007. Here’s the situation as I understand it. Bear in mind that DTV ≠ HDTV: local stations are free to broadcast digital signals with standard-definition programming, and many of them do. (See this FCC page).
There are (I think) 18 different DTV formats , all of which fall under the rubric of the ATSC (advanced television systems committee)– a sort of grandchild of the NTSC. These formats range from ordinary standard definition (SD) TV to the “enhanced” 480p format to full-blown 720p or 1080i, 16:9 signals. The big push behind the use of digital signals is bandwidth: the spectrum allocated for one NTSC TV channel can host several DTV channels. For example, my local PBS station is using its channel allocation to simulcast four different PBS feeds (including PBS Kids), plus the national PBS HDTV feed. The local CBS affiliate simulcasts sports– the other night, when I complained that the Duke game took over from the GT-Kansas game, it turns out that the Tech game was simulcast on the other digital channel. Of course, what’s likely to happen (at least in some markets) is that affiliates will continue broadcasting their existing SDTV signal, then simulcast shopping channels, which they can be paid to carry. This is exactly parallel to the claims by DirecTV and Dish that they carry 160+ channels, when 8-10 of them are shopping channels that no one wants to actually watch.
Anyway, broadcasters currently have to be all-digital by 31 December 2006. The FCC has wiggle room to push this date back until 85% of the people in a given market area have the ability to receive digital signals, either because they have cable or satellite or because local penetration of DTV tuners has increased. By July 2007, TV manufacturers will have to include digital tuners in all of their TVs; 36″ and bigger sets will have to include a digital tuner by July 2005.
Note that this says nothing about HD tuners, just digital tuners. All of the cost estimates I’ve seen are wildly speculative; for example, this WaPo article says that a digital TV will cost $800 in 2007. It’s hard to understand how adding a digital tuner to an existing $250 27″ set is going to triple its price, especially once the low-end, high-volume manufacturers get into the act.
As far as Ron’s original question about how this affects PCI tuner cards, it’s hard to say. There’s already an effort to make all TV sets plug-and-play compatible with QAM-based digital cable systems; it seems likely that ATI, or someone, will make a compatible tuner card that will offer the same functionality. (Right now, the FCC says that cable systems cannot encrypt retransmitted signals from local stations, so even without buying premium channels you should be able to get your local broadcast signals this way). It’s certainly possible to do DTV tuning with a little combined hardware and software; for example, the VBox DTA-111 works quite well with Microsoft’s Media Center for tuning and decoding HDTV channels, and it’s not that expensive (about $200). Economies of scale will drive these prices down.
A parenthetical note: what’s currently not clear is what will happen with satellite retransmission of local channels once they go all-digital. Right now, neither major satellite service retransmits HD network signals, with the exception of the CBS national HD feed. It’s pretty clear that they don’t have enough bandwidth to carry all of the locals, so that opens the question of what happens with SHVIA’s upcoming revision.