On Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:04:22 -0500, Percival P. Cassidy wrote:
On 01/13/10 07:11 pm, wrote:

I can no longer find the message, but I'm sure that it was on one of
these two newsgroups within the past few days that I read an allegation
that the move from analog to digital for TV broadcasting was a plot to
push vast numbers of people to cable or satellite because the digital
signal is receivable only over a very small area.

I mentioned this allegation to a broadcast engineer yesterday. He told
me that in fact many people are not getting good reception of the OTA
digital signals and are moving to cable or satellite because many of the
expensive HD TVs on the market have appallingly insensitive antenna
inputs -- far inferior to the almost-free converter boxes that were
distributed over the last couple of years.

There are proposals to elminate OTA tv completely and let the
broadcasters sell the banwidth or most of it for cell phones etc.

That would be crazy so soon after the broadcasters have spent large sums
of money on new equipment and dumped still-working but no longer usable
analog equipment.

99% of the cost is for the RF transmission and the equipment is the same.