Do not adjust your sets
March 18th 2009 20:14
As a service to the people of Melbourne, Australia, I would like to say this: do not throw your plasma and LCD televisions in the rubbish bin.
It is not clear at this point just how many Melburnians have thrown out their expensive televisions, but they have been pretty much invited to do so by the city's biggest-selling newspaper, the Herald Sun.
The issue is Freeview, a new and repackaged collection of TV channels to be offered by the free-to-air broadcasters, one assumes as a way of competing with the growing cable presence.
Freeview, which has been heavily promoted for several months, will launch on May 1, and the Freeview people were shocked on Monday of this week to read a Herald Sun report claiming that millions of plasma and LCD televisions would become obsolete on May 1 due to changes in the way broadcasters transmit.
The Herald Sun is a major daily newspaper with a long and reasonably proud tradition and it is possible that, in the course of that long history, they have never gotten their facts so utterly mangled as they have in this case.
For the record, all existing plasma and LCD televisions and digital set-top-boxes will continue to work beyond 1 May, 2009, receiving Freeview and everything else without problems.
What existing televisions will not do is receive MPEG4 transmissions, a future platform, capability for which is being built in to the Freeview infrastructure in preparation for a time when we are deemed ready to advance from the current MPEG2 capability. When that time comes, you will need an adapter box. No point in getting one now because no-one is even sending MPEG4 signals yet.
From that little collection of tech-speak, the Herald Sun contrived to squeeze blood from a stone and come up with the obsolete television story.
They say newspapers are dying. Cutting their throats may be more accurate.
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