Interview: The End of Television

Although the delay of the DTV transition to June 12 has taken a little wind out of the sails for the potential of a massive rude awakening for an American public unprepared for the sudden obsolescence of their analog TVs, the transition is still going to happen. While more households will have obtained DTV converter boxes (and that’s a good thing), the transition nevertheless will leave a huge swath of temporarily vacant spectrum ripe for the exploiting.

Back in December I blogged about a Pittsburgh-based project called The End of Television which planned an unlicensed analog TV broadcast of submitted videos on the original transition day of Feb. 17. I contacted Ian F. Page for an interview on the radioshow. At that point the transition was still more than two months off, so he suggested we do something over email, saving a phone interview for closer to the transition. Then Congress delayed our fun, but Ian didn’t give up — he just delayed the End of Television until June 12, too.

Ian was kind enough to still agree to do the email interview to explain the motivation behind The End of Television, and its relationship to other unlicensed broadcasting.

mediageek (mg): Please tell me the inspiration for the End of Television project.

Ian F. Page (IFP): I first heard about the transition to digital television a year and a half ago. The idea actually came up because some one explained to me that the streets would be littered with TVs and that there were specific protocols for recycling TVs. I had been thinking about ways to watch videos alternative to screenings and I began making a video that I wanted to show on TV. I had a burgeoning interest in electronics and after a little collaboration discovered that I could accomplish building a transmitter.

mg: Why is the transition to digital television significant, and why did you choose to mark it in this way, with an unlicensed broadcast?

IFP: I have always enjoyed moments in my life where some mandate or alteration in the daily round comes down from the mountain and WE have to adjust. I remember one day in high school when I overheard a classmate talking about how his cable company had switched the numbers of such and such channels. He was riled up about it. It is a totally insignificant change that somehow agitates the self-programmed thoughtlessness. It gives us a glimpse of the human behind the machine, a glimpse at the power of a medium, whatever that machine or medium might be. Daylight savings is another example, or when the fare for the subway goes up, or New Year’s eve. I like these moments and June 12th is another one of them.

I find the June 12th switch amusing in that the switch cannot happen unless people get involved with their televisions, so a passive medium gets a little physical attention. It is also amusing because the whole ordeal shows our faith in everything digital, the event is a nice marker on the way to accepting anything and everything more efficient and newer. The political activity behind the switch is also a loud declaration that TV is a right, not a luxury. The delay was a very interesting revelation for me, to read speculations and think about what it would be like if people didn’t have TV anymore. It brought back a conversation that I hadn’t heard in a while and from, what I read, the debate was really polarized.

mg: Is the project a political statement?

IFP: I am not approaching it in a political way at all, but the project leads to an interesting idea – the privatization of the electromagnetic spectrum. The idea of owning or trespassing on a person’s radio waves is silly to me. I do not think that someone or some corporation should be able to own a frequency. At the same time I do understand the need for regulation and allocation, since so many lives rely on communications.

Companies own wavelengths, like colors for example. John Deere green is just a wavelength like 88.3FM and both are private. The problem is that the frequencies for the public are ever decreasing. There was never any massive preservation projects for the electromagnetic spectrum like there was for parks, so now experimenters are confined to small frequencies. So if you want to experiment with radio waves and not become a ham radio operator, it is inevitable that you trespass.

mg: What relationship, if any, does the project have to unlicensed or pirate radio?

IFP: It is similar, the difference is only that I am modulating a video signal and audio signal onto a radio wave, rather than just an audio signal. That, and it is at a different frequency, but otherwise they are the same.

mg: Are you willing to share the technical details of your broadcast set up?

IFP: The set up is mostly commercial equipment and some modified ham radio equipment, nothing out of reach.

mg: How many submissions have you received? Can you tell us about any of the more interesting ones?

IFP: To date there are over 30 hours of footage, with more submissions coming in hopefully. The submission deadline is May 25th. I was excited to receive a submission from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, a local filmmaker who is getting involved in the project. The video is something he has wanted to have on TV for a while now and we are glad to give his work the setting it needs.

mg: Finally, besides the obvious need to delay the debut of the project, is there any other affect the June delay of the digital TV transition has?

IFP: The delay revealed to me the elaborate process a bill has to go through to get passed. It also means not as many stations will be turning off at one moment, which potentially lessens the impact of the project on the viewing audience, since there are more people prepared to receive digital television and not analog. Other than that, it is pretty much the same.

Thanks for the interview, Ian!

The End of Television is accepting submissions on VHS or miniDV tape through May 25. Send to:
The End of Television
331 S. Aiken st
Pittsburgh, PA 15232

Obsoletion Watch: Portable TVs

Analog full-power TV got a bit of a stay of execution this month, with Congress voting to delay the digital TV transition until June 12. The passage of the stimulus bill should loosen up some more money to fund DTV converter boxes to help more households avoid the loss of TV service. However, Bohus of RetroThing points out that there’s a class of sets that probably still will be left behind: portable TVs.

As Bohus points out in the video below, converter boxes are often much larger than the portable TVs themselves, and aren’t battery powered. Those are just a couple of reasons why portable TV watchers will be left will little more than home shopping networks and evangelical Christian low-power TV stations come June 12. Watch Bohus give a fun overview of the soon-to-be-obsolete sets:

Rumors of VHS’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Oh, planned obsolescence, you are such an insistent mistress.

It seems like the end of the year news hole combined with the imminent digital TV transition (which does not necessarily mean the end of analog TV…) has sparked additional interest in the press ringing the funeral bells for that most ubiquitous yet unloved video medium, the VHS videocassette. The renewed attentiveness was triggered by a recent LA Times article about the last remaining supplier of pre-recorded VHS tapes to retail stores. The discount supplier tells Times reporter Geoff Boucher,

Photo credit: the waving cat / flickr

“It’s dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt,” said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. “I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I’m done. Anything left in warehouse we’ll just give away or throw away.”

Boucher notes that the last major Hollywood release on VHS was 2006′s “The History of Violence.” However, that does not mean it’s the last VHS release, since there are certainly direct-to-video, corporate, promotional and independent releases still being churned out on videocassettes. And that’s just US market. What about VHS in less developed nations especially India and Latin America, where the push to new formats goes slower because there’s that much less disposible income?

I don’t have a beef with Boucher’s article so much as the second-order press and blogosphere reaction that seizes upon the “VHS is dead” meme rather than the more specific point that the production and distribution of pre-recorded VHS movies are ending. My problem is two-fold. First, I can’t help but think the minor panic-inducing tone of the overall reportage is timed and focused in order to help drive DVD and Blu-Ray sales, especially amongst the digital disc holdouts who up to now have been satisfied with their VHS collection.

Second, it’s overly simplistic to say that VHS is dead just because prerecorded tapes will become more scarce in 2009. One of the most disruptive aspects of home videocassette technology is the fact that it’s recordable; with a VHS VCR you don’t have to simply rely on a steady stream of commercially prerecorded content. I’m willing to bet that millions of VHS VCRs are still in service across the US doing just that — recording someone’s favorite movie on TV or timeshifting a favorite TV program.

Sure, millions of people have shifted to using DVD recorders or DVRs for that purpose, or are time-shifting by watching things online. But that population is still a small percentage of the whole, characterized by having the income necessary to afford these more expensive technologies, combined with the knowledge, interest and will to use them. VHS is dead for a certain class of people, but not the whole country.

Nevertheless, it is true, as one TV report said, that “VHS’ days appear numbered. ” But then, that’s been true pretty much since the first year of DVD, when that technology went on to set records for fast large-scale adoption. Even then the writing was on the wall, just as it is with nearly every single consumer electronics technology ever introduced. Do not doubt that from the time when the first VHS recorder rolled off the assembly line that the electronics giants didn’t have dozens of designs for its successor on the drawing board. It just took until 1997 for DVD to strike the right combination of size, convenience, image quality and price.

Obsolescence is not a natural process, but one planned right into the consumer economy. Now, I’m not arguing against innovations and the succession of technologies with better, more attractive qualities and greater utility. I certainly barely watch VHS tapes myself, and mostly rely on my DVR and on DVDs. So VHS is not a vibrant everyday technology in my household. Yet, that does not mean VHS is useless or dead.

Of course this is the sunset for VHS, but I question the rush to scare people into buying new technologies. Certainly, my recommendation to anyone who has VHS tapes that have irreplaceable stuff on them to consider copying them to DVD, whether it’s a home video or an out-of-print movie (you don’t even need your own DVD recorder — most chain drug stores in the US will do it for you). But that’s as much because of the inevitable slow degradation of magnetic media as it is the eventual death of VHS. I’d make the same recommendation if your precious memories are on DVD — though copying a rare commercially recorded disc will prove more difficult due to digital rights management.

Some justification for declaring VHS’ death rests upon the analog TV transition happening in February. And while it is true that your old VHS workhorse will not be able to record the new digital signals directly, it’s not counted out. The first reason why is that if you still have an analog TV and are using a cable converter box or one of the digital converter boxes for over-the-air broadcasts, then your VCR should still be able to record their digital output. Furthermore, even new digital TVs still have analog inputs for VCRs, DVD players, game consoles and the like, and will continue to have them for a long time. So getting a new flat-panel TV doesn’t mean you can’t still watch your VHS tapes.

Let’s remember that vinyl records and cassettes were declared dead in the early 90s when CDs finally became predominant. And yet, here we are in 2009 and we’re reading about the minor resurgence of vinyl, and you can still buy new books on tape. Sure, you’re not going to find the newest rock albums on new cassette, and new vinyl LPs are still made in tiny numbers compared to CDs. Yet that does not qualify a format as “dead.”

It’s arguable that the LP resurgence is driven both by nostalgia and a hardcore minority that has contended that vinyl sounds better and therefore stuck with the format through the CD era. Cassettes also have some nostalgic allure for many, especially when it comes to memories of mix tapes, while having a much tinier fanbase who cling to the format for its sheer fidelity. I think it’s too early to tell if there will be gathering nostalgia for the lowly VHS videotape in the same way. I’m not sure people have the same emotional attachments to recordings of TV shows and movies that they have for music… but that could just be me.

If you’re wanting to rent or buy the newest Hollywood movie releases then you’re going to need a DVD player — but then, just about anyone with that desire in the US already knows that and has made the appropriate decision. If you’ve still got a VHS VCR and are happily using it there’s no need to panic. Now might not be a bad time to pick up a spare VCR if you can afford it, nor is it a bad time to consider making DVD backups of anything that’s really valuable to you.

But make no mistake, there’s no indication that you won’t be able to buy a new VCR or blank VHS taps for quite some time to come. Unlike Polaroid film or other single-manufacturer technologies, VHS was licensed far and wide. As long as there’s a buck to be made making and selling recorders and tapes, they’ll be out there.

Like cassettes and vinyl records, VHS tapes and VCRs will continue to live alongside the technologies that are supposed to replace them. Going out of favor does not mean obsolete.

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