Amiga and ICTV - The Next Move

[umisef]

>There is a US government plan to provide 10
>millions subsidized digital MOTOROLA STB for
>poor people who cann't afford the new Digital TV.
>The subsidy will be approx. US$ 4 Billions.

Fascinating. If those numbers are correct, you might want to start looking for whose pockets get lined with gold there....

Granted, the US has once again decided to be different from the rest of the world in its digital TV system, but US$400 per box, at a volume of 10,000,000, seems rather excessive --- given that in Australia, standard definition digital free to air TV set top boxes recently were sold for as little as A$50 (about US$40) in single quantity at a supermarket.

[EDIT: Turns out the number originally quoted by the previous poster was in error, and the real number is smaller. Still too big, though --- US$300 and US$67 are both way too much at a volume of 10,000,000 still].

[umisef]

>is Australia's system 'off-air' or DVB satellite?

It's DVB-T, which means terrestrial transmitters (and oldfashioned rooftop antennas to receive it). It's also the same basic system as used in most of the rest of the world which has made serious moves to digital (namely Europe), although in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be decided that not only should Australia stick to its unusual 7MHz channel width, but also it should stick to mainly using VHF channels over UHF (but not exclusively so), AND it should mandate the use of audio encoding which was different from that prescribed anywhere else (MP2 vs the dolby stuff, IIRC. Not sure which way around).

These days, set top box manufacturers have a handle on that, and all the chipsets seem to provide a superset of everyone's specs, so that the same box can work in any DVB-T area. When digital was new, and most everyone considered Australia to be too small a market to make modifications to their products for, things were quite frustrating (it took literally years for the first Oz-capable PCI receiver card to become available )