Absolutely superb article in today’s Age.
The federal government wants to close down the analog TV signal. It can’t do that until enough people have digital TV receivers. People don’t particularly want to spend the time or money purchasing a digital TV set top box. So the government is going to have to spend a couple of billion dollars to continue broadcasting the analog signal for longer.
Sony have even suggested spending $200 million on consumer education, I guess to tell us why we should buy digital set-top boxes.
Alex Encel thinks we should just spend $150 million to give everyone a digital set top box for every TV they own.
What a brilliant solution! It’s not often you get to achieve your goals and also save a couple of billion dollars at the same time!
Yeah, Alex Encel has whinged about this before.
I think it’s a sign of declining editorial standards that The Age allows basically the same opinion piece to run twice. And I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that it’s run in the Thursday Age each time.
When IPTV comes, the government’s going to have a bunch of set top boxes looking a lot like white elephants.
A followup letter in Saturday’s Age, which makes some good points:
Antennas too
Alex Encel says the Government should supply free digital TV set-top boxes to everyone to hasten the introduction of digital TV (Business, 8/6).
The proposal is only half the answer. Without a large increase in the number of transmitters to provide country and fringe areas with adequate reception, the current analogue system will remain for many years.
Free set-top boxes with the current number of transmission towers would require many new antennas, which, with installation, cost much more than set-top boxes.
Ralph Leditschke, Cowes
Very intesting. Sometimes what’s omitted is more important than what’s stated.
I would have liked to have written a longer article but it wouldn’t get printed.
I can’t put everything in the one article
Yes we will need more transmitters /repeaters but this will have to happen irrespective.
It may as well happen early and save the billions. When digital power goes up problems will
lessen though they will still exist.
Some antenna will need to be changed but this has been happening for many decades.
I don’t believe IPTV will come in so quickly but even if it does we will have saved more
money than the cost of the set-top boxes,etc
The overriding point is that these problems will exist irrespective of closedown date