Craig Birkmaier wrote: > The market for set-top boxes in the U.S. is > ALREADY MUCH LARGER than in the UK. But these > boxes have nothing to do with off-air reception. Frankly, Craig, I fail to understand this constant refrain of yours. It is completely illogical. Just as your previous skepticism about HDTV was. > This is to be expected in a country where 85% of > home have chosen NOT to receive OTA broadcasts > as their primary source for television. The numbers I used for the immediate ATSC STB market in the US. They are the existing 15 percent of households that uses nothing other than OTA TV. So it's an absolute minimum, and that absolute minimum is considerably larger than the UK DTT market has been, which is the envy of the whole world. > Of these, a sizable percentage will move to cable > or DBS if NTSC is shut down. By what logic would you say this? This is most likely not the case. Simply because, by all accounts, that 15 or so percent OTA households has held constant as long as the naysayers have been claiming OTA was dead. And with good STBs, and NTSC off the air, I'm betting there will also be quite a few folks just trying it out for kicks. Just as happened in Germany. DBS or cable users. And some might actually like it and stick around. The 15 percent OTA users are people who refuse to become dependent on yet another single provider, for something that is not mandatory to sustain life. We don't subscribe to one gas station, or one supermarket, or one movie theater, or one restaurant either, even if we are constrained to subscribe to one power utility and one water and sewage utility. Anyway, good and low-cost STB chipsets will also be used by DBS providers to more reliably be able to solve the local into local issue without additional satellites. Seems a natural way to go, especially because DBS needs an antenna or two anyway. Also, you will find that the antenna problem is not what you keep pretending it to be. ATSC, at US power levels, will work better than NTSC for indoor reception at quality levels that people will accept as a permanent solution. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.