The Lance J. Technoweb

After 90 years, traditional US television broadcasting is fading fast. ATSC 3.0, the newest US TV broadcasting standard, looks great on its face: modern, efficient, and flexible.  But there are growing problems, a tired plot that has been repeating over and over for all US broadcasters: Very poor content.  Broadcast TV is loaded with very low-value content.  Why watch broadcast TV if the programming is abysmal?  Yes, there are some excellent programs, but that's about 1%. High ad frequency.  Broadcast TV has a huge and growing volume of advertising. Why watch broadcast TV if the ads are so amazingly annoying, and when all of them feel like money scams? QVC may be profitable, but is it a significant value to the public? High cost.  The broadcast industry is working to make the tuner in your brand new TV obsolete in just a few years. Why buy a new TV today if it is just going to be obsolete in a couple of years? Blocking.  The broadcast industry is acti...

I purchased my Apple TV on its release day, in October 2015.  It continues to serve me perfectly, after nearly 10 years of active use. Although it is decidedly not the newest model of Apple TV, it does 100% of the things I want it to do without any issues.  Sure, I'd love a more modern SoC, gigabit Ethernet, Thread support, 4k video support, etc, but honestly I am not missing any of those features, so "upgrading" it today would be a waste of money.  I did sell the original Siri remote in 2023 and upgrade to the 3rd generation (USB-C) Siri remote. The original Siri remote was working great, but I figured after 7.5 years of use, it was time to get a new remote with a new battery.  I will likely upgrade my Apple TV in the future, but I can't predict when that will be.   Due to a quirk of its release strategy, this Apple TV was discontinued in late 2022, and so it is likely to be supported for several more years. A new device would have to be a leap ahead, because m...

2001 was the year when the largest percentage of US households were subscribing to Cable TV service (71%).  Since then, the CATV subscriber percentage has fallen... and precipitously. Peak Cable wasn't in 2015.  It wasn't in 2008.  It was in 2001! What is worse, by 2023 the households subscriber number had fallen to 34.7%.  That's right, half off its high water mark.  And is has continued to plummet since then. Why have so many people left cable TV? No doubt Cable TV's continued sky-high pricing convinced a lot of people to cut the cord and instead go to streaming services.  High base prices, ever-rising special fees, unavoidable rental costs, and scam-oriented "discount bundles" have all conspired to make the typical Cable TV bill run well over $100 each and every month. The Cable TV value proposition simply failed. So what's next for Cable TV?  I suspect no resurgence and a continued slow decay.  The people who are still on Cable TV simply don't...

I recently bought a new, modern HDTV: a 42 inch, 1080p Panasonic LCD TV. And one of the first things I wanted to do with my new TV was to hook it up to my trusty MacBook. Like many modern TVs, my new TV has a VGA input, so I figured that'd be the right way to hook it up. I got the following stuff together: Mini-DVI to VGA dongle VGA cable with integrated audio I plugged the dongle into the MacBook, and I plugged the VGA cable between the dongle and the TV. Sure enough, my Mac's video image immediately appeared on my TV. I figured with a little fine tuning, I'd get a great 1080p image! I was wrong. Attempt #1: MacBook to HDTV via VGA dongle and cable The major disappointment is that many new TVs, like mine, won't accept a high resolution 1080p-class signal over VGA. Although my MacBook's "Display Preferences" control panel displays a huge range of potential video resolutions, very few of them work adequately (or at all) with my TV. I wound up setti...

If cable TV customers experienced over-the-air digital TV, the cable industry might lose a good chunk of their customers. Here's the story: A few weeks ago I decided that I was going to convert some old home VHS videos to DVD, and so I went shopping for a simple DVD recorder. I figure a DVD recorder would be more useful, less frustrating, and more fun that some video gadget for my PC. SoI logged onto Amazon and I bought myself a DVD recorder. And just for fun, I bought a model with a modern digital TV tuner inside. I've never played with over-the-air digital TV, so this was my chance. Well, the DVD burner works pretty well (more on that in a subsequent post). But I really want to talk about the Digital TV tuner. In short, over-the-air digital TV is something that the cable TV companies must have a lot of fear of. When I was a kid, we watched all 7 local channels - Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 25, 38 and 56. Yeah, there were other channels, but they were totally unwatchable. And e...