Digital broadcast TV was a big, big mistake

[Karim D. Ghantous]

About 20 years ago, give or take, digital TV services began in Australia. Most people just got a set top box, and a small minority of us still have HDTV receivers because we haven't upgraded our TVs yet. I personally don't watch TV, but it's handy nonetheless. Eventually people upgraded their TVs, too. By the tens of thousands. Retail loved it, and I won't begrudge them that.

But was it a good idea? No, it was a terrible idea for a variety of reasons.

One, it encouraged people to upgrade too quickly. Two, all you need for broadcast TV is a decent SD signal. We don't use free-to-air TV as a part of our digital cinema experience. It's meant for convenient, casual viewing. Please tell me why I need to watch the news in HD? (I don't watch the news, which is nothing but junk food for the mind, but I digress). The Internet can be used to supplement the broadcast system, anyway. We also had to expend energy and resources into recycling all our old TVs, which were perfectly fine units.

A final reason is that it trivialised the ownership of home video. We have home video, and in some cases home cinema, for good reasons. Why should we be paying, albeit indirectly, for a system that in some cases offers similar quality to owning a DVD or Blu-Ray disc? Those people who wanted a better home video experience were certainly free to buy bigger TVs and rent or buy DVDs. Netflix of course is the final ingredient - with no government subsidies, Netflix does just fine.

I still do not have an HD TV. I still use the Loewe flat CRT that we got 15 years ago. It just never was a priority to upgrade, even though I would have liked an HD TV to play the odd video game - many of them are optimised for HD. Only now am I looking to upgrade, and I'm looking at the Loewe Bild 4K series ATM.

My household is unusual, I'll admit. But even so, I regret that we spent any time implementing digital broadcast TV. I guess governments have to look like they're keeping up with the times, just like some people just have to keep up with the Joneses.

 

[Marc Wielage]

We love HD and adopted it back in 1999 and actually watched over-the-air TV here in LA for several years. But eventually, we found that digital ATSC broadcasting here in America has a lot of flaws: with analog, you have a "wiggle factor" were you can have marginal reception and still get a coherent picture. With digital, you reach a tipping point where the signal completely goes away... for a few frames, or a second, or even several seconds. I think we finally got fed up with over-the-air broadcasting around 2005 or 2006 when we were watching Lost in HD on ABC, and a nearby helicopter happened to fly through the transmission path, and we lost reception for a key moment in the episode (just a couple of seconds, but enough to kill it for me).

We switched to DirecTV satellite from that point on, and still use a combination of DirecTV and streaming (Apple TV, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.) for our home entertainment. We can record permanent copies using a Blackmagic Hyperdeck. We have two different LG OLEDs at home, both cast-offs from my color room, but they're still reasonably calibrated and look fine for home use. HD and 4K have been a great experience for us. Being able to see great pictures informs my career and keeps me aware of visual trends with cinematographers, color, plus it's great entertainment.

I find it fairly incredible that anybody could seriously work in production or post today and cling to a standard-def CRT. But this explains much.