In Finland, analog TV had been in use since the 1950's. In 1996 the government made the decision that all TV broadcasts would be transitioned to digital broadcasting by 2006. The first digital TV broadcasts started in 2001, and analog TV broadcasts were slowly phased out during the years, and completely and officially terminated in 2007.
This was a rather lucrative time for companies manufacturing and selling digital TV receivers (which at first were separate boxes, and later were more commonly integrated into new TVs, especially the upcoming LCD/Led flat TVs, as this period of time also started the transitioning away from CRTs.)
For many people this didn't feel right. Many analog CRT TVs were quite literally dirt cheap. You could buy a small TV for pennies, especially if used, from some flea market or such. The new digi-TV boxes were quite expensive in comparison. (You could easily get a small used CRT TV for like 10€ or less, while digi-TV boxes at the time typically sold for like 80€ at their cheapest, often much more, which for a very low-income person was a hefty sum.)
To complicate things even further, for an unfathomable reason there was not one single digi-TV standard. There were actually three: One for aerial broadcasts, one for cable broadcasts, and one for satellite broadcasts. And all three were completely incompatible with each other.
This meant that you had to be careful what kind of digi-TV box you were buying. If you bought the box for aerial broadcasts (which, for some reason, was almost always significantly cheaper than the others, I have no idea why), but your housing company actually delivered your TV signal through cable, it wouldn't work. (Since in most Finnish households TV signal just comes from a plug in the wall, it's not nearly always apparent what kind of TV signal it is. You had to actually find it out in order to purchase the correct type of digi-TV box.) Also, if you later moved to another apartment where they used another type of TV signal, your existing digi-TV box would stop working there.
More damningly, though, digi-TV was for long advertised as having all kinds of advantages, none of which came to be true! It was promised, among other things, that:
One major problem with current digital TV (at least as it was implemented in the early 2000's here) is that it uses the same MPEG2 video compression format as DVDs use... but with a significantly lower bitrate. DVDs have a reasonable image quality (at least before the advent of BluRay), but that's because they can afford to use a relatively high bitrate. Digi-TV, however, has to use a much lower bitrate due to limited bandwidth, meaning more lossy compression artifacts become visible.
And this is not just theoretical. If you look at almost any TV broadcast up close, you'll clearly notice the MPEG compression artifacts (which become especially visible in darker shades and gradients). It can sometimes be glaringly obvious.
The fact is that digi-TV image is often of lower quality than the old analog TV image with good reception, which is the exact opposite of what was promised.
There's also the fact that with poor-quality aerial broadcast reception, digi-TV is either on or off. With analog TV at least you could see something, even if it was very noisy, no matter how poor the reception. This might have been enough at remote locations where somebody was interested eg. in watching the news. Even if the image was really noisy, at least they could get the news, weather predictions, and so on. With digi-TV, however, it can become impossible: If the reception is poor, you don't get anything at all.
The fact is that, when it comes to image quality (and many of the other technical aspects), the very early 2000's was perhaps the worst possible time to make this the overarching sole TV standard. That's because video compression technology was still in very active research and development, and better and better technologies were developed by the week. Current video compression formats are of much higher quality than the low-bitrate MPEG2 used in digi-TV. These newer formats could deliver a much higher-quality image using that same bitrate. (Also, technologies could have been developed to fix the issue of poor reception, to allow at least some kind of image and audio to be shown.)
Also, multiple choice of audio and subtitle languages never came to be. This promise ended up being just an outright lie. This was not true in 2001, when the first digi-TV broadcasts started, it was not true in 2007, when analog TV broadcasts were completely terminated, nor is it true today, in 2019. The vast majority of TV broadcasts have only one audio track, and in the case of foreign language shows (like movies and TV series), the subtitles are burnt into the video, not as separate soft subtitle data which can be selected from various languages or turned off.
And those multiple video tracks from which you can select the viewing angle of a sports broadcast? Yeah, forget about it. Nobody ever bothered implementing such thing. (Most digi-TV boxes or digi-TVs probably don't even have any buttons or functionality to select between them.)
Nothing of what was promised was delivered. Video quality is poor (significantly poorer than your average DVD, and in many cases poorer than the old analog TV), there's no choice of audio or subtitle languages, subtitles are still burnt into the video and can't be turned off, and there are no multiple video tracks in any broadcasts. It all ended up just being a really expensive trainwreck that benefits nobody. Well, nobody except the digi-TV manufacturers, that is.
This was a rather lucrative time for companies manufacturing and selling digital TV receivers (which at first were separate boxes, and later were more commonly integrated into new TVs, especially the upcoming LCD/Led flat TVs, as this period of time also started the transitioning away from CRTs.)
For many people this didn't feel right. Many analog CRT TVs were quite literally dirt cheap. You could buy a small TV for pennies, especially if used, from some flea market or such. The new digi-TV boxes were quite expensive in comparison. (You could easily get a small used CRT TV for like 10€ or less, while digi-TV boxes at the time typically sold for like 80€ at their cheapest, often much more, which for a very low-income person was a hefty sum.)
To complicate things even further, for an unfathomable reason there was not one single digi-TV standard. There were actually three: One for aerial broadcasts, one for cable broadcasts, and one for satellite broadcasts. And all three were completely incompatible with each other.
This meant that you had to be careful what kind of digi-TV box you were buying. If you bought the box for aerial broadcasts (which, for some reason, was almost always significantly cheaper than the others, I have no idea why), but your housing company actually delivered your TV signal through cable, it wouldn't work. (Since in most Finnish households TV signal just comes from a plug in the wall, it's not nearly always apparent what kind of TV signal it is. You had to actually find it out in order to purchase the correct type of digi-TV box.) Also, if you later moved to another apartment where they used another type of TV signal, your existing digi-TV box would stop working there.
More damningly, though, digi-TV was for long advertised as having all kinds of advantages, none of which came to be true! It was promised, among other things, that:
- Image quality would increase significantly. Higher resolution, no more noise.
- Movies and live broadcasts could be watched in multiple languages. In other words, you could select your language of choice, as multiple audio tracks would be broadcast with the video.
- Likewise, subtitles would be selectable from multiple choices, or turned off completely.
- Video broadcast of live events, like sports events, could come with multiple video streams, coming from different cameras, allowing the viewer to choose which viewing angle they wanted to watch.
One major problem with current digital TV (at least as it was implemented in the early 2000's here) is that it uses the same MPEG2 video compression format as DVDs use... but with a significantly lower bitrate. DVDs have a reasonable image quality (at least before the advent of BluRay), but that's because they can afford to use a relatively high bitrate. Digi-TV, however, has to use a much lower bitrate due to limited bandwidth, meaning more lossy compression artifacts become visible.
And this is not just theoretical. If you look at almost any TV broadcast up close, you'll clearly notice the MPEG compression artifacts (which become especially visible in darker shades and gradients). It can sometimes be glaringly obvious.
The fact is that digi-TV image is often of lower quality than the old analog TV image with good reception, which is the exact opposite of what was promised.
There's also the fact that with poor-quality aerial broadcast reception, digi-TV is either on or off. With analog TV at least you could see something, even if it was very noisy, no matter how poor the reception. This might have been enough at remote locations where somebody was interested eg. in watching the news. Even if the image was really noisy, at least they could get the news, weather predictions, and so on. With digi-TV, however, it can become impossible: If the reception is poor, you don't get anything at all.
The fact is that, when it comes to image quality (and many of the other technical aspects), the very early 2000's was perhaps the worst possible time to make this the overarching sole TV standard. That's because video compression technology was still in very active research and development, and better and better technologies were developed by the week. Current video compression formats are of much higher quality than the low-bitrate MPEG2 used in digi-TV. These newer formats could deliver a much higher-quality image using that same bitrate. (Also, technologies could have been developed to fix the issue of poor reception, to allow at least some kind of image and audio to be shown.)
Also, multiple choice of audio and subtitle languages never came to be. This promise ended up being just an outright lie. This was not true in 2001, when the first digi-TV broadcasts started, it was not true in 2007, when analog TV broadcasts were completely terminated, nor is it true today, in 2019. The vast majority of TV broadcasts have only one audio track, and in the case of foreign language shows (like movies and TV series), the subtitles are burnt into the video, not as separate soft subtitle data which can be selected from various languages or turned off.
And those multiple video tracks from which you can select the viewing angle of a sports broadcast? Yeah, forget about it. Nobody ever bothered implementing such thing. (Most digi-TV boxes or digi-TVs probably don't even have any buttons or functionality to select between them.)
Nothing of what was promised was delivered. Video quality is poor (significantly poorer than your average DVD, and in many cases poorer than the old analog TV), there's no choice of audio or subtitle languages, subtitles are still burnt into the video and can't be turned off, and there are no multiple video tracks in any broadcasts. It all ended up just being a really expensive trainwreck that benefits nobody. Well, nobody except the digi-TV manufacturers, that is.
Interesting that it cost so much there.
ReplyDeleteWhen the U.S. transitioned (OTA broadcasts only, as cable and satellite were exempt), the boxes were nominally $20, but every household got a voucher which made the box free.
And the quality of the digital broadcasts were significantly better than analog, in my opinion.
I wonder why the experience was so different.