Gossip: Impact of Digital TV
July 14th, 2009
Recently I’ve built an antenna for myself, and it brought me 72 channels. Yes, you read it right, 72 channels. This makes me wonder why I used to pay hefty bucks to cable companies before.
After I tuned my channel to channel 2, which tells people to switch to digital TV, I finally realized: it’s the picture quality. In good old days the only way to guarantee crystal clear quality is to use cable or satellite TV. Conventional UHF/VHF channels always suffer from flaky and blurry pictures. Digital TV is the game changer. If the signal received is strong enough, you’ll get crystal clear pictures. The worse you have is mosaic sometimes, which satellite TV already proved that people don’t quite care if the mosaic were controlled in certain degree.
So why should people pay these companies hefty subscriptions today? IMO it’s just habit, and people still don’t know how good that simple antennas could bring to them. Premier channels like CNN and HBO might be the reason, but I don’t think that’s a strong enough reason. Along with my 72 channels, I only watch about 10 to 12 of them. I remembered when I was with Cox cable (150 channels) and DISH network (100 channels), I still watch about 10 to 12 of them. For guys like me, I only care if I can get my sports channel hosting games I wanna see, and NBC/ABC did a fairly good job of it, in OTA TV.
If the cable companies couldn’t think of something creative, they’ll play defense very hard for both local DTVs and the forthcoming FTTH competitions.
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