Well, it seems the DTV transition will not be delayed after all. The Senate voted on Monday to allow stations to shut down analog broadcasting at any time between February 17 and June 12, but the House of Representatives defeated that bill today.
As Barack Obama takes the oath of office as the 44th President of the United States, he faces more challenges than most who have gone before him. While it's certainly not at the top of his to-do list, the transition to digital-only over-the-air television broadcasting is of growing concern to many Americans who rely on OTA as their only source of TV programming, and this concern has not escaped Obama's attention.
As we bid a fond farewell to 2008—"fond" in the sense that many are glad to see it depart—it's only natural to take a look back at the year gone by and try to sneak a peek at the year to come. In the realm of home theater, there's a lot to ponder...
Rob from Hawaii—at least, I assume he's from Hawaii, since he started his message with "Aloha"—wants to know if DLP is still a viable option for TV shoppers:
After stuffing ourselves with turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pecan and pumpkin pie—a la mode for me—my wife and I took in a couple of movies over the long holiday weekend. As it happened, the experience clearly demonstrated the differences between film and digital projection.
This Thursday is the national pig-out known as Thanksgiving, followed by the national sellout known as Black Friday, the official start of the holiday shopping season. Retailers normally give thanks at this time for the sales that represent a major percentage of their annual business, but this year, they're likely to have much less for which to be thankful.
DVRs (digital video recorders) give advertisers and broadcasters fits. These wondrous devices allow viewers to quickly skip over commercials, compressing an hour-long show to under 50 minutes and avoiding all those annoying ads. But wait—those ads are what pay for the program itself, so if few people watched them, they'd lose their value, and the programs would dwindle and finally disappear.
Here at <I>UAV</I>, we're always looking for new reviewers. My staff of freelancers is already working at capacity, which means I need to find some new voices to join our ranks. If you think you have what it takes to be a reviewer, I'd like to hear from you...
Several months ago, I <A href="http://blog.ultimateavmag.com/scottwilkinson/050408pain/">posed a question</A> in my blog, asking you how high gas prices had affected your entertainment activities. Now, of course, things are much worse as the entire economy circles the bowl, even while gas prices ease up a bit. So I thought it would be interesting to revisit the question in light of the worsening economic crisis.
As many of you know by now, I appear as a weekly guest on <A href="http://techguylabs.com"><I>The Tech Guy</I></A>, a nationally syndicated call-in radio program hosted by Leo Laporte. During a recent show, I was explaining the difference between 1080i and 1080p, a confusing subject to be sure. Shortly after the show, I got a rather long e-mail from John Sullivan pointing out what he thought were mistakes in my explanation. I'll interlace my responses with his comments...
This week at <I>UAV</I>, we've posted a review of Toshiba's XD-E500 upconverting DVD player. This might seem a bit odd, since we haven't reviewed a DVD player in quite a while—instead, we focus on Blu-ray these days.