[opendtv] Re: 20050926 Mark's Monday Memo

At 11:16 AM +1200 9/28/05, Barry Wilkins wrote:
>Well, go on John. Say it anyway. It's always fun. It kind of reminds me of
>the movie "Groundhog Day", where Bill Murray says"Well, what if there is no
>tomorrow? There wasn't one today" Accordingly, there appears to be no
>reasonably priced properly performing ATSC receiver today...and tomorrow
>never comes (so far).

A reliable source in the Nation's capital informs me that he has one 
of these new ATSC STB's, and that it works fine (with a silver sensor 
antenna) in the urban canyons of DC, where lawyers ply the 
politicians with cash for political influence. So ten years after the 
standard was approved, it looks like it can be made to 
work...marginally. We will need to wait and see what these boxes will 
cost. Without a huge order subsidized by the U.S. treasury, it would 
appear that there is no incentive to bring these boxes to market.

For the past few weekends I have been looking at the DTV ads from the 
usual local suspects: Sears, Circuit City, and Best Buy. Each has its 
own unique way of designating whether a set is HD ready or it 
includes an ATSC/Cable tuner. Best Buy calls the integrated sets DCR 
- Digital Cable Ready. Circuit City uses HDTV Monitor and HDTV 
integrated.  Looking through all of these ads, the lowest price for 
an integrated set is still above $2,000. There are a few cheaper 
CRT-based sets available, but they are rarely advertised.

The real question one must ask, is whether Joe Sixpack cares about 
any of this. To be certain, if NTSC is turned off, some people will 
be pissed. But the reality is that very few will bother to get a DTV 
set-top box and put up an antenna at any price, including a highly 
subsidized price.

The real question we should be asking is when we will shut down TV 
broadcasting as we know it. Clearly the media - Fox news Channel 
included blew it badly with Katrina. All it takes today to make news 
is for somebody - anybody - to make a wild accusation, and the media 
will fall all over itself reporting these rumors as facts.

The Police Chief of New Orleans resigned yesterday. Given the reality 
of how his organization mishandled the disaster, this seems just. But 
the media focus is on the fact that he spread lies and rumors, which 
the media then reported as news. Today in our local NYTimes paper 
there is story about all of the major misrepresentations of fact that 
the media - TV, radio, newspapers et al - spread after Katrina. I 
guess you could call this a "retraction;" one must question why it 
took a month to get the real facts out, and only then in an article 
buried on page six.

Having lived through at least six hurricanes when I was growing up in 
South Florida in the '60s, I am forced to wonder how the hell we got 
through all of this without the assistance of the Federal Government. 
There were no billion dollar no-bid contracts from FEMA to help with 
clean-up. I got $2-3 an hour to help clean up the neighborhood. 
Within a day or two of the storm I would pile up huge mounds of 
debris - piles 10 feet wide and 3o feet long in front of each house. 
Like magic they would be gone in a day or two. LAst year after 
Francis I put a similar pile in front of my house in Gainesville. It 
too six weeks for the local government agencies to figure out how to 
clean it up, with assistance from FEMA.

With all of those storms in the '60s - several were category 4 
storms, we never suffered any significant destruction of our homes. 
At worse I had to fix some fiberglass screens that were torn by 
flying debris. The only evacuations that took place were the folks 
with homes and apartments on the beach, who would come across the 
bridges and stay a mile away from the worst that the storms could 
dish out. I did see some cars that were sand blasted if left out near 
the beach. The reason that there was little property damage was the 
South Florida Building Code, developed in response to the 
devastations of the big storms in the '30s and '40s. Our house was 
concrete block with an 18" concrete header poured around the top with 
steel straps to hold down the roof trusses. The roof was concrete 
tiles; I think we lost two tiles in one storm when the sustained 
winds topped 160 MPH.

After the intense cycle of storms in the '60s South Florida really 
started to explode, and the South Florida Building Code was abandoned 
because of the high construction costs. The destruction caused by 
Andrew came as no surprise - as the Wolf told the first two little 
pigs, I'll huff and I'll puff til I blow your house down.

So many things have changed in the past fifty years. How the hell did 
we ever survive without big brother to lend a hand?

Regards
Craig

Regards
Craig





 
 
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