Digital Broadcast TV Deadline

As the deadline for analog TV broadcasting to end gets nearer, the December 31, 2006 date for the cut off doesn't appear to be feasible. The original legislation had the caveat that 85% of American households needed to have adopted. We won't reach that point in a year and two months so Congress is working on legislation to extend the deadline. Yesterday the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a bill that would extend the analog go dark date to the end of 2008.

The original legislation was low on the radar for the average american TV viewer. Hopefully, news of this new bill will make more aware that their analog TV won't receive over-the-air broradcasts in another couple of years.

Not everyone sees the need to spend the money for a new HD television set. What they have works just fine. I actually went out and bought a new 32" analog set a couple years ago intending to avoid getting a HD set. Since I'm a digital satellite users this will work fine for me. At leasts until Direct TV decides to force users to upgrade to all digital boxes. Hopefully, they'll be smart enough not to force that but encourage it.

I still think there will be some surprised and shocked viewers on January 1, 2009, when they can't watch the Super Bowl on broadcast TV. Talk of governmental rebates sounds nice, but the economic reality of giving American TV viewers the money to cover the cost of getting a digital conversion device seems unrealistic. I predict that instead this will be a great boon to cable and satellite whose boxes do the conversion and you get all those channels.

I've been wondering what will happen to broadcast TV as it continues to lose audience over time. Now I'm interested to see what happens if the audience drastically goes down in one day. Yeah you can get local channels on cable and satellite, but they cost more, at least on satellite, and with all the other programming in competition, local and network doesn't attract my attention anymore. I can't remember the last time I watched a network prime time TV show. I stopped doing so several summers ago when reruns ran me right to some interesting cable channels and I've never returned.

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years. Stay tuned.

Digital Movie Theaters: Too Little Too Late?

In my New Information Technology class we’ve been discussing digital cinema. As part of this topic we’ve looked at the movement toward digital projection in movie theaters. With this summer’s agreement on the technical specs for the equipment and systems to project movies digitally (see http://www.dcimovies.com/press/07-27-05.tt2), the serious implementation of digital movie theaters is underway. Recently Christie/AIX, the funding arm for Christie digital projection, began the rollout of, a planned, 4000 digital theaters across the next couple of years (see http://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr.aspx?newsID=329). This has been followed by, first, Disney and then Twentieth Century Fox quickly jumping on board to provide movies in the digital format needed for digital theater projection.

So, finally, the film industry is ready to let go of a 117 year old method of projecting movies. That is, some are ready. While filmmakers like George Lucas and Jim Cameron are serious proponents of shooting movies digitally, there are many who aren’t quite ready to let go of exposing celluloid. The savings, though, on the cost of movie prints and their distribution has made digital distribution and theaters a significant cost-cutting strategy.

In discussing the benefits of digital theaters, my students pointed out that while this benefits the theaters and studios, what’s going to be the benefit to theater goers? If the movie industry is saving money are they going to pass it along by lowering ticket prices? This is a key point. If there’s no perceived benefit to the ticket buyer, the students feel the conversion to digital theaters does little to get them to go to the movies. The movie industry saves money in distribution, but over time, if attendance continues to decline the industry continues to lose revenue. We’re already down to only 9 % of Americans describing themselves as regular movie goers according to a 2004 Ipsos poll reported on by Paul Hodgins in the Orange County Register (Sept. 29, 2005). The question then is what can the movie industry do to keep theater attendance alive?