Aliens Steal Cable/Analysis: Difference between revisions

{{Analysis}}{{trope}}

There are a lot of problems with the idea that [[Aliens Steal Cable|aliens could get our Television messages]].

First, while an AM or FM audio signal is mathematically easy to decode back into a sound wave, an analog TV signal is very complex; it's essentially a set of instructions to tell a receiver how to shoot electrons at a screen to make [[David Hasselhoff]]'s rugged suntanned face 25 or 30 times a second. Let's not forget that if you want to see the ''color'' of that suntan, there are three ways to go about that: the quadrature amplitude modulation of NTSC (USA, Canada, and Japan), the frequency modulation of SECAM (France, Mongolia, and much of the former USSR), and the quadrature amplitude modulation switching phase every other line of PAL (most of the rest of the world). [[VCR|VCRs]]s, [[DVD]] players, and TV sets have to be built either specifically for each of the three television systems or having additional circuitry to be multi-system, or they'll show a black-and-white picture, a rolling picture, or no picture at all. Digital television, which rose to prominence between 2000 and 2010, is even more complicated, involving cosine transforms, motion encoding, entropy codes, and trellis channel coding.