How does hdtv make money

Countless photos of TVs online make them look like trapezoids, which makes it difficult to judge size. It's a good idea to clean the TV before you photograph it.

Don't use Windex! Most household cleaners will strip away the delicate screen coatings. You can easily ruin the TV you're trying to sell. A soft microfiber cloth should suffice. You might not even have to get it wet. Read more: How to clean a TV screen. There are actually some steps you should take before you unplug it. The most important is to log out of any apps you've been using. How to do this varies.

You might have to do it individually, or there might be a global option in the settings menu. There's also the "nuclear" option: a full factory reset. Buried deep in the menus there's likely an option to return the TV to how it was when you first bought it, all settings erased, all logins forgotten.

If you do this, however, it might also delete any firmware updates. Best to let the buyer know either way. Just unplugging the TV almost certainly does not erase your settings or your personal info. By far the most difficult aspect to selling a TV is getting it out of your house and into someone else's. Don't underestimate this step. TVs are bulky, heavy and very, very fragile. They hate being moved. Even if you have all the original packaging, there's still a good chance the TV isn't going to make it to its new home.

If you're planning to ship it, make sure you check with whatever agency you're using well before the sale to find out pricing, pickup info and, most of all, insurance. If you sell a TV and it shows up broken you'll be out the money you just made and the TV.

Far better is to only sell locally. Perhaps you're lucky enough to have a vehicle that can carry the TV, in which case you might be able to arrange dropping it off with the buyer. If you don't, verify that the buyer can pick it up before you sell. If they think they can get a inch TV in the back of the Camry, everyone's going to have a bad day. It's a safe bet that only the smallest TVs will be able to fit into the back of a sedan. Hatchbacks, wagons, SUVs, really anything other than a sedan, might be fine.

Make sure the buyer brings lots of soft blankets, and wherever the TV goes in the car, it's able to be well secured. Make sure there are no pressure points, like seatbelt buckles, on the screen itself. Laying the TV flat may seem like a good solution, but one good bump and poof. It's possible you, or someone you know, has transported a TV this way without a problem.

Luck is a poor substitute for planning. Your local Home Depot or Lowe's might have a small truck you, or the buyer, can rent for an hour or two, which might be cheaper than a full day's rental from a car or truck rental place.

The best way to think about transporting a TV is to think of it like you're transporting a piece of glass, because you basically are. Don't twist it, don't put any weight on the screen, use two people to lift all but the smallest models. And lastly, of course, wear a mask and maintain social distancing the best you can. I'll end with a demonstration of what your listing should look like joke brand notwithstanding. Good luck! Suppose the broadcasters could wriggle out of their obligation to transmit HDTV, and suppose they could get permission to continue using plain old NTSC - while transmitting it digitally, so it could be compressed.

They'd still be able to use most of their existing video equipment, while magically acquiring 5 MHz of "spare" bandwidth! They could fit five or six compressed channels into the space formerly occupied by just one! This was like a landlord realizing he can subdivide a house into six apartments, charge six times as much rent, and get an exemption from real estate taxes.

Would the FCC allow such wild profiteering? There was surely no precedent for it, and no principle that could legitimize it; yet Reed Hundt seemed to find it acceptable. If the American people want more channels, and broadcasters can afford to provide them over a digital signal, government shouldn't stand in the way.

There was one little snag in the broadcasters' scenario: any new channels would have to be supported by extra advertising. But, he said, "there is no evidence that sufficient advertising revenues exist to support these dreams. Well, all right! Forget advertising!

Why not charge subscription fees for additional, compressed NTSC channels? There's something shocking about this concept. After all, broadcast TV has always been free, and broadcasters are expected to honor that inconvenient little obligation to serve the public interest.

But Congress has never passed a law to stop TV stations from charging for programs, and Reed Hundt didn't see any problem in this, either. Would there be anything wrong with that? In that case, why not allow broadcasters to go beyond TV altogether?

As one of them phrased it with polite, euphemistic understatement, "If we do go digital, we should be able to offer other services. Other services? What could that possibly mean? Well, a TV station could fulfill its minimum "social responsibility" by continuing to transmit one free channel in digitized, compressed NTSC, and then it could use the remaining spare bandwidth to sell local paging, or stock quotes, or even software that it could distribute to computers fitted with digital antennas.

Hundt did mildly suggest that if broadcasters wanted to do this kind of thing using the new bandwidth that was loaned to them for a transition to HDTV, maybe they shouldn't get it as a loan after all. Maybe they ought to pay for it. As a matter of principle, though, he saw nothing wrong with broadcasters subdividing their original ration of radio-spectrum real estate.

If they could find a way to make huge, unprecedented profits by compressing old-style NTSC and selling pay services on the side, they should be free to go right ahead. Why was he being so obliging? For that matter, why hadn't Congress worded its instructions to the FCC so that broadcasters would be forced to transmit better pictures, which was obviously the original idea? News coverage on networks and local television stations can make or break a political career - and legislators are aware of this.

It's no surprise, then, that some sources at the FCC speak privately and derisively about the "craven attitude" of Congress toward the broadcasting industry. To take just one example of Congress caving in to broadcasters' demands, consider the federal law that forces every cable company to carry all nationally broadcast network programming as a free service. On the other hand, broadcasters are highly motivated to get along with the FCC because it has such power over them.

This seems to leave the FCC in a position of unchallenged authority, except that its commissioners and chair are hired and can be fired by the president of the United States and must do whatever Congress says. This gives them an incentive to maintain good relations with their friends on Capitol Hill. Finally, FCC officials have a deep-seated desire to avoid annoying their friends in industry, which is natural enough when you realize that many former top-level officials have moved into jobs in the private sector.

In the harsh estimation of one university historian who specializes in media studies, today's FCC commissioners "are a bunch of spineless weasels more under the thumb of industry than at any time in their history.

Add it all up and you have a tangled mess of codependency in which everyone wants to be nice to everyone else. Small wonder, then, that the FCC has sat on its hands while the kids at the birthday party come up with increasingly far-fetched, greedy strategies to grab more than their share of cake. On November 28, , after more than two years of bickering and deliberation, the Grand Alliance delivered its verdict: it couldn't agree on a single standard.

Instead, it proposed 18 different standards. Broadcasters would be free to choose from among these options, and TV manufacturers would have to design hardware that would be compatible with all of them. Moreover, one of the formats wasn't high-definition at all: it was plain old NTSC, digitized and compressed, just the way broadcasters wanted it, so they could free up most of their bandwidth for those excitingly lucrative "other services.

The Grand Alliance actually claimed this was all in the public interest. Their multiple formats allowed three levels of resolution: by, 1,by, and 1,by-1, pixels. There would be two aspect ratios: the old picture and a new wide-screen option. This way, viewers could have a small, cheap, low-resolution, squarish-screened TV in the kitchen and a big, expensive, high-resolution, wide-screened console in the living room.

Each unit would be able to convert any of the 18 formats to its own display mode, using a special chipset; and for a suitable price, Grand Alliance members would be happy to license this chipset to other manufacturers - such as the Japanese, for instance.

Clearly, this chipset would inflate the cost of television receivers, so the small, cheap TV in the kitchen wouldn't really be so cheap after all. But the broadcasters were highly influential, and the FCC wasn't going to stand in their way, so multiple formats were the only possible compromise. The Grand Alliance plan did have one virtue. By bribing all the kids with double helpings of cake, it finally stopped their squabbling. Yet there was one last, unexpected problem: a new bunch of gate-crashers suddenly arrived at the party screaming, "We want some cake, too!

Ten years from now, video will be disseminated via the Net like any other form of data. Therefore - obviously! Their argument was complicated, but one word kept recurring: interlace. If a picture flashes more slowly than around 50 times per second, the human eye can see it flickering.

Movies are shot at only 24 frames per second, but when we view them in a theater, each frame is flashed onto the screen two or three times to minimize the flicker effect. NTSC television uses its own methods to suppress flicker. In the first one-sixtieth of a second, all the odd-numbered lines of the line picture are transmitted. In the second one-sixtieth of a second, all the even lines are transmitted - and the screen glows persistently enough that the odd lines are still illuminated while the even lines are inserted between them.

Why not transmit the whole picture every one-sixtieth of a second, instead of just half of it? Because when the NTSC format was developed in the s, half a picture was the most that could be sent in one-sixtieth of a second within the available bandwidth. Unfortunately, interlacing creates some ugly visual defects. Consider a live transmission of a football zipping across the screen.

During the first one-sixtieth of a second, the odd-numbered scan lines show the ball on the left. By the next one-sixtieth of a second, the ball has moved, and the even-numbered scan lines show it in the middle of the screen. The odd-numbered lines are still visible, so we see the ball in two places at once. This generally means that fast-moving objects seem smeared or fuzzy in an interlaced display.

It also means that if you do a freeze-frame, or if you save a video image as a still picture, objects that were in motion will appear extremely blurred.

Interlaced video also runs into trouble displaying thin horizontal shapes. If the shape is so thin that it coincides with only one of the scan lines, it will appear only in alternating frames, causing it to flash visibly 30 times a second. To suppress this effect, TV cameras automatically thicken any horizontal shape so it will cover at least two scan lines. This of course reduces the amount of detail that the picture can display. New problems occur when an interlaced picture is digitized and compressed.

Compression schemes such as MPEG work by sampling a picture and simplifying it - but an interlaced transmission sends only half the picture at a time.

If each half is separately compressed, they may not be a perfect match after they are decompressed by the TV receiver at the receiving end. Interlaced displays were abandoned by the computer industry years ago, when users started demanding high-quality graphics featuring fine lines and minimal flicker. All computer monitors now generate a complete picture every one-sixtieth of a second. In Europe, for historical reasons, the standard is every one-fiftieth of a second.

When video is created this way, it's known as noninterlaced or progressive scan , meaning that each whole frame is drawn on the screen progressively from top to bottom without skipping any lines. During , according to the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association, about 9.

By comparison, about Noninterlaced monitors still lag television sets in market penetration, but they're clearly gaining ground, and it seems foolish to ignore their importance as a display medium. Why not get rid of this cheesy cost-cutting practice once and for all, in the interests of true compatibility? The Grand Alliance violently disagreed with such arguments. Some of its members claimed that consumers would never watch TV on computer monitors, simply because the screens are too small.

Well, certainly the computer industry had its own interests in mind. It believed that people would want to watch TV on computer monitors, and it hoped to benefit. It also liked the idea of transmitting computer graphics via TV. This simple desire to meet consumer demand surely seemed reasonable, especially compared with broadcasters' yearning to exploit their free spectrum with "other services.

A progressively scanned picture will always contain twice as much data as the same picture transmitted in interlaced mode.

Therefore, it will always require twice as much bandwidth. This is true even if both pictures are compressed. Clearly, if a TV station owner wants to free up as much "spare" bandwidth as possible, he won't transmit a high-quality, high-capacity progressive scan. He'll stick with the low-quality interlaced mode while claiming that no one can tell the difference. Therefore, the coalition was in no mood to compromise.

The old aspect ratio would be eliminated, and the previously proposed ratio would be expanded to to make it suitable for CinemaScope movies.

Images would be encoded using a system similar to Kodak photo-CDs. A low-resolution "base layer" image of 1,by pixels would be broadcast for cheap, low-quality receivers along with extra information to tell higher-quality TVs how to enhance the "base layer" to create a superhigh-res 2,by-1, HDTV picture. This system would enable easy upgrades, because the base layer of data would always stay the same while the fine-detail data could be enhanced to the limits of future technology.

Cheap low-res TVs really could be cheap after all. Broadcasters were appalled. Every other format would be eliminated - including dear old NTSC! There'd be no room at all for "other services. They would have to transmit HDTV. Did the FCC take a side in this final standards battle? Not at all; the new kids were just as welcome at the birthday party as the kids who had been there originally, and if they wanted to promote their own plans for grabbing more cake, they should go right ahead.

Meanwhile, in public statements, he remained noncommittal on the formats issue. Wasn't there something a little odd about this? That's a lot of work. At least your meals are paid for when you're in production. One contestant revealed that the director paid for her family's lunch every day and even took them out to dinner one night. Plus, they got access to those sweet, sweet craft services snacks. There is actually a contingent of onscreen personalities that get paid even less than the homebuyers: the realtors.

But while they don't get that cold, hard cash, they get a ton of publicity. It's common for reality show contestant stipends to be low. Of course, if it's a competition show, there are big payouts for the winners.