Victim Of The Digital Transition: Analog TV Guide On Screen Devices?
Bruce Perens over at Technocrat pointed out something I hadn’t even thought of, and that I don’t recall being discussed elsewhere - the pending possible failure of TV Guide On Screen (TVGOS) dependent devices. According to Gemstar, more than 25 million households have TVGOS devices. Many, probably most, of these devices obtain their data from a signal embedded in the local analog PBS station’s broadcast. While an updated version of TVGOS which can use data from digital stations was released in 2006, most of the installed devices are analog-only.
The Gemstar TVGOS guide system was, and is, used in many TVs, VCRs, DVD recorders, and even DVRs. The Sony CableCARD DVRs, the DHG-HDD250 and DHG-HDD500, rely on TVGOS for not only their guide data, but also to set their clocks.
What will happen to all of these devices when the analog broadcasts cease on (or before) February 11, 2009? Even if you don’t use antenna, if the local PBS station goes all digital, the feed to your cable provider would be from the digital source. Even if the cable provider continued to provide the channel in analog form, it would be unlikely to contain the TVGOS data as the source feed would not. It seems likely that these devices will simply cease to function, or at least suffer a major loss of features, when the guide data is no longer available. It is already known that the Sony DVRs wouldn’t work in some areas of the country where the TVGOS data was simply unavailable as it was not carried by any of the stations.
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December 27th, 2007 at 08:32
What makes you think that the delivery of analog channels to cable will change?
At this point the infrastructure is in place and has worked for years. If the cable co’s started to use the digital feed and convert it to analog, it would require new equipment that would only be used for a limited time, as cable is expected to cease analog in the next 5-10 years.
Now, I’m sure there are some examples where cable co’s are receiving the analog signal OTA, and they’ll have to change the deliver method, but it’d still be cheaper to keep the signal analog then to go digital.
December 27th, 2007 at 17:26
It is already changing, cable systems are looking to providers to provide content in digital formats because it takes less bandwidth and storage. Back-end systems are going increasingly all-digital with each upgrade. And the channels themselves are often going 100% digital on the back-end as they move to ATSC. Everything is being done digital, and if there is need for an analog feed it is simply taken from the digital source.
The cable systems already have systems in place to handle digital sources, because the major cable networks are distributed digitally. And many local network channels supply the digital feed to cable, which then converts it to analog for analog cable customers - the same as they do with many cable networks.
Even if the cable company took an analog signal from the channel, if the channel does everything digitally on their end and simply converts to analog for cable, then it still won’t have the embedded data. And that’s if the cable company continues to provide the channel in analog format at all - some cable systems are already 100% digital.