Yay! It's over... for now.
According to another journal, they're finally over, but they'll return like a resistant infection in 2010. Of course it's still not a good idea to turn on broadcast television as there is soon to be a political convention, followed by another political convention. And then campaign commercials and campaign coverage (for TV values of...) ad nauseum ( Read more... )
- everything won't be insisted on being 100% flawless
- no fakery or copyright violations
- no protests against the host country leading up to the Games nor during the torch run
- the host country's medal take will be far, far, far from the top of the podium. (Hell, last time we hosted the Summer Games (1976) we didn't even win any gold medals!)
Also, you're American, they don't seem to focus on the Winter Games as much as we (and some other countries) do, so I don't thin the coverage will be as pervasive as it was this year on your TV.
I'm in agreeance with your last sentence, especially if the word "NTSC" is removed from it. (We get pretty much all our TV here via cable or satillite, hardly any over-the-air any more, so there isn't that much concern advertising about Feb. 17 up here, the only times I see ads for it is on US television. Correct me if I misunderstand what the Feb. 17 change is about, I don't think I fully understand the whole thing ... )
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If you've seen the ads or public service announcements about the Feb 17 change, you understand about as well as anyone. That's when most analog TV broadcasting in the USA will cease and the big switch to digital happens. Small translator stations will still be analog, at least for a while, and cable and satellite reception won't change right off. But folks who get TV from the regular antenna and directly from the primary broadcast station (and not a translator station) will have to go digital either by using a digital set, or a digital converter box between their antenna and their analog TV. That's the "simple" version.
Digital TV is not necessarily high definition (HD). What is a single analog channel now can either carry a single HDTV signal, or multiple channels at lower resolution. Thus one station can be HDTV *or* transmit a few channels at once.
And, unless things change, it looks like Canada gets to go through the analog cutoff in a few years, too. I went looking around last night, and evidently the current plan is to phase out analog TV broadcasting in Canada in 2011.
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I'm not really into sports myself (note that I didn't say I didn't like them, I'm just ambivalent toward them; and if I act like I'm excited about them (like when Winnipeg was in the Grey Cup last year), my lack of knowledge outs me pretty quickly.)
As I mentioned, I'm way more interested in it from a vexillological and anthematological point of view, as I said, it's like the Olympics for me or something! (Sadly, it was subpar for me on that front, the only medal ceremony I got to see (despite the Games being on in the background somewhat during the two weeks or so they were on) was the marathon during the closing ceremony - and there were no real surprises with flags, and the anthems were plagarized (from a composer/conductor/musician that I know personally put in a lot of hard work on the originals)
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I managed to go the two weeks without being exposed to more than about 10 minutes of the summer games.
2009-02-17 is when -over-the-air broadcasts- in NTSC stop in the USA. Canada uses NTSC as well, so may have over-the-air broadcasts in NTSC beyond our cutover. These will be cut over to ATSC format and require HDTV tuners and antennas to pull off the air. I don't think cable or satellite operators will cut over from NTSC to ATSC at that point -- they certainly aren't obligated to.
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