INSTALLATION DAY #2

Today’s lesson #1: The digital transition will need technical support. Not just a webpage with frequently asked questions. And certainly not an email box. But a real live person willing to spend more than an hour with a frustrated non-technical person. This is what it will take to ensure a smooth transition.

Glory be to Samsung technical support! This second day of installation, frustrated with the enigma of unresponsive technology, I resolved to do some more research to figure out where I went wrong. I called Samsung technical support in the AM from work, and they suggested that I connect the antenna directly to the set-top box and the box to the TV, bypassing the VCR/DVD. I asked how this would ensure that I could record off-air TV or play DVDs but I didn’t get a satisfactory answer. They suggested I call back when I had the equipment in front of me, which in retrospect was an eminently reasonable suggestion.

Needless to say, I was skeptical. I did further research, going to the NAB-sponsored website, http://www.myfreehdtv.org/. Lo and behold they had an actual wiring diagram for hooking up a set-top box to an analog TV with a VCR! With barely restrained anticipation, I went home and tried the configuration they suggested and…. Even worse than the first time!

Later that day, at home, I called Samsung technical support again. The initial person couldn’t help but forwarded me to a “level two” technician, who was very eager to help and who provided a lot of accurate information on the DTV transition itself. After he patiently ensured the wires were all put in the right places (too complicated to replicate myself, I think, or to explain here in English), he guided me through the use of the channel capture process, the menu, the means of navigating and adjustments to the display. Hands down, this was the best technical support I have received from any equipment manufacturer, even though the bar is generally pretty low in this field.

Now this analog household has access to digital signals. Here’s what I found. Lesson #2: While you may get more channels and clearer pictures (even with an analog display), digital has its own kind of interference that can be even more annoying than analog. Reception was pretty good using the indoor antenna and required few adjustments. The only time the antenna needed to be rotated was to receive some of the public TV stations, which are not located on the same antenna farm as most of the commercial stations. Interference came in the form of pixilation and audio distortion (the latter sounding like what happens when a CD goes bad). You could still tell there was a channel being received and could recognize the program content, but the interference was not as easy to ignore as in analog when you get fuzzy pictures, loss of color, sparkles or bands across the screen. Ultimately, after watching one channel for a while, my wife preferred the analog consistency to the digital clarity. In particular, she noted (as did I) that the drop-out of audio, which never occurs in analog, was the key annoyance, especially if it occured at the punchline of a situation comedy (prompting one to ask, so, hey, why is the studio audience laughing?). This is a very important experiential result that should not be dismissed.

Interestingly, I believe I could loosely correlate the pixilation and audio distortion to cars and busses passing by our somewhat busy street. Busses seemed to cause a lot of distortion; cars less so.

I did note that digital brought some advantages. First, the picture was somewhat clearer until pixilation or audio artifacts occurred. Second, I appreciated the additional content from those stations that were multicasting, especially the public stations, which had additional children’s streams and travel shows. Additionally, PAX was also multicasting, providing movies and shows that I thought might otherwise be on cable (e.g. Little House on the Prairie). The other commercial stations’ multicast fare was simply an additional channel of local Doppler radar. However, this may have been so because their daytime shows were in HD and anything additional would have exceeded their off-air capacity (the 19.2 Mbs broadcast stream).

While the additional content was interesting, it should be noted that two channels could only be received in analog. The first, WHUT, the Howard University public TV station, is a unique and creatively programmed station that I like a lot. That station was sorely missed in the digital lineup, but I look forward to seeing it soon. The second channel, UPN 20, was also missing, although I rarely watch it (my wife watches it more than I do). I also noticed that the Telefutura station was received in digital while the Univision station was not.

Which leads me to lesson #3: the increase in content streams was a pleasant surprise, but I cannot say it would be sufficient to motivate me to convert to digital unless I were faced with total loss of analog service. This is an important point. A mere technology change, without a significant increase in available content, would not in itself be a sufficient reason to convert to digital. Writ large, this means that at present, the only reason for analog-to-digital conversion is the looming government mandate. Surely a government mandate in conjunction with a disengaged or disinterested citizenry will spell disaster for the digital transition.