Impact
Digital TV encoding allows stations to offer higher definition video and better sound quality than analog, as well allowing the option of programming multiple digital subchannels (multicasting). However, it provides these advantages at the cost of a severe limitation of broadcast range.
Digital signals do not have 'grade b' signal areas, and are either 'in perfectly' or 'not in at all'. Further, since most stations have elected to use UHF rather than older VHF channel allocations, their actual broadcast range is far less than previously. Viewers in major metropolitan areas will likely not notice problems, however, rural TV users have generally had most and in some events all of the stations they previously received with acceptable but not 'perfect' signals fall over the digital cliff (as the loss of signal has been described).
Lastly, many low-power broadcasters have been temporarily permitted to transmit in analog for several years.
Read more about this topic: Digital Television Transition In The United States
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)