I'm a cheap bastard, so I pay as little as possible for crap I don't really need. I live in a crappy place and I drive a crappy car. I don't have cable and I use dial-up Internet. My cell phone costs $7 a month (Virgin Mobile).
But that allows me to spend lots of money on stuff that I want. For example, I have 40 good shirts for work and six pairs of pants. Now, if each shirt can be worn with each pair of pants, then I could wear a different "outfit" to work every day for most (or even the whole) of the year (since most Americans work 240 days a year). I like to buy clothes.
Don't even ask about my DVD collection or all the other crap I tend to waste money on.
Like the XO laptop I don't use. Maybe if I drank coffee and went to Starbucks and activated my free wi-fi that came with the XO, I'd use it, but so far I haven't had the need to turn it on.
But I don't like to waste money on TV since I don't watch TV in my crappy house because I'm never home. So for the few hours a week that I am home, I don't want to pay $40 a month for TV. The same with the Internet; it doesn't take massive bandwidth to post to this blog.
Anyway, in anticipation of the switch to digital broadcast TV, I bought an LCD TV with an ATSC (digital) tuner. Yes, it was extremely inexpensive (dirt cheap).
So here is what I can watch right now:
NBC in 1080i is usually a strong signal, but often the image freezes and dumps a screenful of pixels over and over and the sound cuts out. Right now, the Today show is on, but my digital information for this broadcast says I'm watching American Gladiator.
ABC is 720p and unwatchable.
ABC-2 is 480i and unwatchable.
FOX is 720p and a good signal.
Local PBS is 480i with a good signal and good picture, and 480i is a little better than a traditional analog transmission (I'd say about 25 percent better picture, but I don't have any way to measure the signal).
But even with a good signal, the audio and video for each channel are out-of-sync by a fraction of a second, but I still notice it. But this is with my current "rabbit ears" antenna. I don't know if I need to buy a new one to get a better signal. A visit to antennaweb.org tells me that I probably need an antenna with a blue symbol on the box and I'll need to mount it to my roof (like that's gonna happen).
I'm guessing that digital signals will only get worse with all the interference from every other device. And this will force everyone liek me to subcribe to cable or satellite or broadband Internet with a TV card. But the traditional "free" TV that all Americans grew up on, will be gone because whatever exists will be unusable.
As of now, the government with pay to get me a digital tuner box but not an antenna. And I just tried to tape the 1080i digital signal from NBC to my VCR and I got nuthin, so I don't know if I'll ever be able to record any TV after the digital switch.
So for me, digital TV is a losing situation. It means I need to cough up for at least a new antenna or consider watching/recording through my computer, which I haven't even thought about.
All I know is, even with all the fiddling I had to do to get relatively clear reception with an analog signal for UHF/VHF channels, at least it was the same for everyone. Now if I want to watch something on TV, I'll need to give a technician my exact address and a list of all my hardware components before we can figure out why I can't watch American Idol, I mean Frontline, I mean Las Gatitas y Ratones de Porcel.
