This is the day that the poorer people lose their television (vouchers smouchers!). It’s the day that portable and battery-powered sets become obsolete. We should be happy. Television stinks, anyway. I’ll miss the live weather reports.
We bought an HDTV because my husband wanted one so badly, and there was a decent price on them at the after-Thanksgiving sales. Then he realized all the shows he likes are on the local stations, and he finally heard me complain about the cable bill being so high ($60 a month) so we dropped cable. (He also promised me if he got an HDTV I could get a new sofa to replace the one his mom gave him 30+ years ago. I’m still waiting for my sofa. Now the excuse is that we have to save every penny for our daughter’s college tuition because the college fund went down so much).
The other TV is hooked up to a converter box, which hardly ever pulls in all the stations on any given day, and if someone walks through the line-of-sight the TV stutters like in the old TV show “Max Headroom.”
There’s nothing worth watching on the state-run media anyway. Big Brother can keep his telescreens (and I’ll see you in room 101 when the thought police come to take me away).
If it was up to me, the HDTV would be hooked up as my computer monitor! 
When I bought the HDTV, I dropped our cable service because I found that I could get good reception with just an indoor antenna and a signal amplifier (ebay). Charlene, with an outdoor antenna I think that you should be able to pull in your local stations and PBS. Our local PBS channel is broadcasting three different programs at the same time. My wife likes to watch PBS-3, which is cooking, art, travel, etc., while PBS-1 is standard PBS programming. I don’t watch much TV, but I have agreed to sit on the couch with my wife at 9 pm to watch whatever she chooses. I can’t say that I am getting used to watching the gruesome autopsies on the crime shows, though. It’s interesting to see what the women are wearing to work. I don’t think that they would have gotten by with that at the bank where I worked.
Doug,
Did you really just say that:
Your wife is having you watch, inappropriately dressed, women, in a bank, preforming gruesome autopsies?
I haven’t seen much TV since Opie left Mayberry… 
The poor people in my community have always had better TVs than anything I have ever owned including cable connections. I paid ten bucks for my box, it works great with my rabbit ears except when a storm comes down the rivah.
For those with a computer, I bought a USB device (about $100 with antenna) that turns my computer into part-HDTV. It works great–better than the new TV that I bought later ($250 with antenna). The computer device includes software for recording shows.
About 80% of the country has cable or satellite already and they don’t have to do anything. Those that haven’t already gotten a converter box, or a new TV tend to be older folks with poor English skills. For the rest, getting a converter box (with coupon), or a new device isn’t that difficult, given that this has been in the works for many, many years.
There is still plenty of analog over-the-air TV here in San Diego. If your Spanish is good, and your tastes run to lots of telenovelas and Sábado Gigante.
The HDTV in the living room is hooked up to the roof antenna, and now that we have it pointed in the right direction it works fine. This is a really old, stationary antenna - I know there are new ones that rotate as needed to pull in the signal. It’s the old TV in the bedroom hooked up to the converter box and rabbit ears that stutters.
And of course we can’t record anything on the VCR anymore. It doesn’t tune in the digital signals. If we were on cable or satellite it would still work. But since there’s nothing worth watching one time anyway, it’s no big deal.
As far as the computer converter thing - I’ll bet it won’t work well with dial-up. The Internet barely works well with dial-up.
I don’t think the device Bill mentioned has anything to do with the internet. It’s just a digital TV tuner. It’s like the converter boxes, only with USB output so you can watch on your computer.
It ain’t any better over here.
The Analogue..signal is becoming obsolete…
Sign up for Cable, Satellite and all that …
I have the full package…what a waste of time and money.
Mrs.D has one hobby..and that involves watching TV…
The thought crossed me mind…that if I got rid of her…and the TV…and then the dreaded Television Licence…not to mention the fee for having this privilege.. I’d be OK.
Then I found out that I need a TV Licence for a Computer…
Sometimes I wonder…
Slan,
D. 
They’ve been threatening to withdraw the Analogue service here in darkest Buckinghamshire for years. However, they haven’t managed to supply an adequate alternative. Freeview is unobtainable here. My darling wife has it on her to-do list to sign up with Sky, also on the cards for years. Other things seem to take priority, like the children’s exams, and the dishwasher breaking down. I don’t mind. Sky does not impress me, with what I’ve seen at friends houses.
Box Sets. That’s the way forward…
As long as I can watch Operacion Repo, I’ll put up with the digi-boxes. The On Demand feature is a joke. Starz movies are second-rate (they gave me that for “free” with conversion). Just remember, this whole deal was enacted so the Feds could sell bandwidth for other forms of communication and cable companies could put the permanent advocate for lower living into your living room (convertor-processor boxes). Sure enough, when I got the Digital Starter Package and On Demand, I could buy pron. That never would have happened via regular airwaves. At least the wall of having to pay for it is still up.
MTGuru has it right. I happen to still use dial up and the TV works well. The Internet connection speed has nothing to do with the TV.
The USB device pulls from the antenna, just like a TV. The device may be sluggish on a really old computer, but a desktop or a notebook with at least 1 GB of memory and 20 GB of free hard drive space for recording will likely do okay.
If that’s the case I’ll have to look into it. And then get a larger monitor.
I rescanned the computer-TV in the morning and it got all the available channels. I turned on the regular TV in the evening and half the channels were gone. I rescanned the regular TV and still half are missing.
If all I had was the regular TV I would be upset. The regular TV’s antenna is further from the window and that may explain why the reception is worse. I don’t understand how I lost half the channels from yesterday to today though. I’ll rescan again in the morning, when reception seems a bit better.
The computer USB device I have is WinTV from Hauppauge. My computer is a four or five year old Dell notebook. The antenna a GE Quantum amplified antenna.
/edit to add: if a person is considering a new monitor, a new HDTV is going to be about the same money as buying the USB device plus the new monitor. Another factor is that I can’t watch TV (in one window) and use the computer (in another window) at the same time. The TV-software uses almost all of the processor cycles on my computer. That’s one reason I got the stand alone HDTV.
Up here in the mountains it’s been the case forever…if you want TV, you have to have cable. We don’t get telecast or radio broadcast up here…never have.
It’s all in what you’re in to, I guess…if we didn’t care to watch TV, we’d have been without for the past 10 years. Because we do like to watch TV, we’ve been ready for the digital switch for the past 10 years.
Why not hook the one in the bedroom up to a VCR or DVD player and just use it to watch pre-recorded stuff?
Redwolf
It’s because today’s the day they outlawed conventional television broadcasting.
The VCR and DVD are both hooked up to the big TV, so we can watch videos on that one. It’s just that once in a while we have things to do in the evening and my husband doesn’t like to miss his shows. I thought I’d really miss the Weather Channel and Mythbusters but I don’t.
There is something weird on one channel tonight - a message that looks like it’s intended for Dish subscribers saying you need to get a new smart card in order to see this channel. We’ll rescan in the morning and see what we get then.
Huh? I lost half the HD channels on my HDTV. They were there yesterday or at least partially there. Today–blue screen of death, so I thought I had nothing to lose by rescanning. It’s weird because I still have those channels on my computer-TV and the two TVs use the exact same brand of antenna. Maybe I need one of those upside-down left-right mouse pads or something, or maybe they need some at the TV station.
P. S. where I live, two of the networks run their own weather channel.
Yup, analog TV has gone the way of the dinosaur… this includes rabbit ears. You must either buy a digital converter box or sign up for cable or satelite service in order to continue wiping your mind clean of independant thought. 