John Shutt wrote: > But according to Bert, as soon as a hard cutoff date is > announced LG will open up this huge vault somewhere in > South Korea and flood the U.S. market with millions of > STBs priced at under $50. > > Until a hard cutoff date is announced, however, the > vault stays locked and the U.S. gets nothing, not at > any price. No vault involved, John. You aren't getting the dynamics. Without a hard cutoff date, LG (and others) don't see any market. So they produce nothing new at all. They figure there's already an OTA scheme that works fine for broadcasters and for most OTA users, and it's called NTSC. With a cutoff date, there will be demand no matter whether broadcasters make their DTT offerings more attractive than their analog stuff or not. Just keep on keeping on, and a date certain will create a huge demand for STBs. I mean, even if only 15 percent of households each buys a single STB to keep using their old sets, that's still what? About 22 million STBs? A huge market at the stroke of a pen. Much as it was with UHF. There's absolutely no reason to believe that COFDM would change this in any way. Create a US version of COFDM STB, and change the exciters in all DTT transmitters, and nothing would change. People don't care about modulation. They just want their TV service to continue. And mostly, that has nothing to do with OTA anyway. And broadcasters are still going to worry more about cable carriage than any neat-o OTA plan, because they are convinced that people want more choice than OTA can offer anyway. Oh, I forgot. There might be an impact. Possibly the Schubin apartment building would have to follow those rigorous MATV installation guidelines to permit residents to receive DTT. Indoor reception of COFDM at that site is still "unproven" (therefore presumably impossible). Luckily, following those guidelines will also permit use of 8-VSB first generation receivers. 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.