HDTV Magazine Articles

Over two years ago I wrote an article titled A New Approach to Components in a Digital Audio/Video World to share my thoughts regarding equipment options in Home Theater and related electronics. At that time I outlined the reasons that components might provide a better overall solution to an all-in-one box in terms of upgradability, performance and sometimes even price. Basically, the upside focused on the ability to upgrade as needed without replacing perfectly adequate and functional parts and the downside involved more boxes and wires than the alternative. While that's a gross simplification of the whole hypothesis you can review the entire argument by referring to the original article.

The basic principles of that paper still apply but a lot has changed over the past two years...

On July 2006, based on an estimate of the number of households who rely solely on OTA television broadcasts, the U.S. Commerce Department proposed coupons for an estimated 21 million U.S. households to aid the purchase of converter boxes,

Congress passed a law providing an initial $990 million dollars within a $1.5 billion program to subsidize the purchase of converter boxes

This part in the series discusses the implementation of tuner integration, its timing within the DTV Transition, and its impact on existing and future DTVs. I will talk about over-the-air (OTA) and cable reception, integrated tuners and set-top-boxes (STBs), and satellite STBs.

This is an analysis of the facts related to tuner integration as implemented over the past 6 years within the 10-year DTV transition, and how those facts affect consumers depending on the service they use (broadcast, cable, satellite, or Telco).

At closing I will also identify...

This part is dedicated to tuner integration and the role it was expected to play in the DTV Transition.

As mentioned in part 3 of this series, 15 million households have over-the-air-only TVs, and many cable/satellite subscribers may also tune broadcast on their secondary TVs.

Would DTV tuner integration address this situation?...

Part 3 of the series has the objective of helping the reader get a general picture of the adoption of digital TVs; the growing of the DTV installed base, household coverage, the combined conditions of both to meet the deadline of the DTV Transition and a projection for the eventual replacement of the full inventory of analog TVs within the US.

Over recent years some of the figures tossed by...