Posted by David McCall on 11/28/05 18:42

"Richard Crowley" <richard.7.crowley@intel.com> wrote in message
news:dmfei2$9ju$1@news01.intel.com...
>
> A last attempt at competing with 500 channels on your satellite
> dish or 200 on your cable.
A point that I would like to bring up is that the mandate
to switch broadcast to digital is just about over the air
broadcasting. If you use rabbit ears or an external TV
antenna (not a dish) the you will need a new digital ready
TV or a converter to convert the over the air signal to
analog for your older TV.

If you have cable or satellite, then it will be up to them to
provide an analog out (as they do now), as well as a
digital connection for your digital TVs. The broadcast
mandate shouldn't have much effect on non broadcast
signals, except that most new TVs will be equipped for
digital reception, and eventually they will stop having
analog inputs. I think the analog tuners will go away
pretty quick, but the analog inputs will likely stay for a while.

Some of you probably remember when FM radio came
along there was a mandate in the US that all new radios
must have both FM and AM reception. There were
converters and tuners that allowed people to listen to
FM stations on their AM radios, or on their "Hi-Fi" systems.

Similarly, when UHF came along, there was a mandate to
put UHF tuners in all new TVs, but there were set top boxes
that converted the UHF signal to something you could receive
on your older VHF only TV.

They won't leave you without a way to receive a TV signal,
but you may need some sort of set-top box to get it.

David

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