Digital TV Conversion
I got my digital TV cards in the mail today. This is not the most urgent thing for me, because I always have cable. As for the whole forced conversion thing, it makes little sense. Congress should not have had a deadline, and just let the conversion happen naturally as stations change over and people buy new sets. Maybe it is a form of corporate welfare to TV makers and converter box makers or something. After all, the government didn't force a conversion from 8-track to cassette, or from AM radio to FM radio, or from black-and-white televisions to color televisions. My main analog set does quite well, and I feel no need for digital signals at this time. I've got digital cable. My only complaint is that when you change channels, it takes a long time for the new channel to come in (but I guess all digital cable systems and satellite signals have this problem)
I can write a lot more about how Congress has messed up the TV situation with meddlesome laws. About the "local carry" law meant that the local cable company was forced to take 4 network affiliates off its dial, and we never had an actual UPN station as a direct consequence of the law.... making it difficult to see "Star Trek: Voyager", "Star Trek: Enterprise".... or even the "Dilbert" cartoon, which I once saw at 1 AM Monday morning. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" in its first run remained nothing but a rumor to me because of this law which censored the UPN network off my cable line-up and prevented the WB from properly showing shows when it was supposed to.
One of the nice things about having two affiliates for each network, was that whenever one affiliate decided wipe out prime time shows, the other affiliate would show them. This happened a lot with Billy Graham Crusades, which would run on prime time on one NBC affiliate, but not the other. Or once our local network affiliate decided that "Beetlejuice" was bad, so they showed a very lame made-for-TV movie from the 1970s instead of airing the network television premiere of "Beetlejuice" that many of us were looking forward to seeing. Boy did that station get telephone complaints the next day...
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