Q's View on Television

Within the last decade of technological surges
 on all existing (and many newly created) fronts, the common denominator, that has brought television back onto a level playing field with the various media competing for viewership, was the transition from analog to digital broadcasts. Now, without the needed converter to decipher the digital over-the-air broadcasts, a television that may have been top of the line in 1990 is little more than a large paperweight that can be plugged in.
For those in the audience who did not question the “Why” behind TV’s digital transition, or who simply went along with it because it gave them a new excuse to go buy a bigger and better television – it would have been much simpler just to say, “the men” – in simple terms, the old analog stations were major bandwidth hogs. In the same chunk of radio frequency spectrum formerly taken up by one analog television channel, the new digital broadcasts can include two fully high-definition channels, five standard-definition channels, enhanced audio like DTS™ and Surround Sound™, and information and interface signals (allowing you access to on-screen show details, and feedback from your set to the station for things such as on-demand viewing).

There old analog channels needed a much wider separation between them, so as not to interfere with each other, as compared to the lower-powered digital signals. All of this combined allows for much more bandwidth available for entertainment content, and unless the physical laws of electromagnetics can be changed by man (get in line behind this “global warming” thing) there is only so much usable radio frequency spectrum to go around. Besides making room for even more mind-numbing channels of useless fodder coming into your living room, this digital transition resulted in quite a nice chunk of space for new first responder and emergency communications frequencies. (More in-depth information is available at http://www.dtv.gov/consumercorner.html.)

During the section of his speech focused on the challenges of finding an audience, Rupert Murdoch spoke to the need to diversify television broadcasts across both geographies and platforms, enabling networks access to the widest range of viewing audience possible. While television was a strictly synchronous media a generation ago, now it can be recorded and viewed later, downloaded onto a wide variety of portable or home entertainment platforms, or viewed via video streaming on-demand. In short, by going digital, television has remained a relevant source of video content; a source that would likely have been overcome by something more Internet-based had it not kept pace with the Digital Age.

Murdoch, R. (2008, April 2). Creative Destruction: News for the 21st century. Speech delivered to Georgetown University, archived at http://fora.tv/2008/04/02/Rupert_Murdoch_News_for_the_21st_Century