Re: OTA TV
The new (since ATSC switchover) definition of "fringe area" is apparently "50 km from city center". Yes, I can get OTA from over 200km, often, but only in some directions, and lost quite a few local stations at the switchover. Who could have guessed that hills could attenuate signal?
I also have to wonder if the new-new standard will fix the often horrendous skew between video and audio. I first noticed it on an analog TV, during the dual-standard period. Figured out that while the local-transmitter -> TV path was analog, the networks had taken to digital transmission from network to local station. I am still baffled why, 90(?) years after Western Electric introduced sound-on-film, the boffins at Digital R' Us can't keep sound within a few seconds of picture. Some films seem to have been badly dubbed from English to English (Both cable-QAM and OTA, BTW, so it's presumably a problem in constructing the stream)
"Better Compression" will also presumably mean more situations where a line across the screen and a tick of sound (analog) gets turned into muted audio and a picture in the witness protection progam for several seconds (at a crucial plot-point, of course) .
Yeah, I'm old. Old enough to remember when CATV was becoming a thing, and political battles about actual communities versus private industry featured arguments about how the private path would lead to vast amounts of quality programming and no commercials, at a nominal fee. How's that working out?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
