Forgotten Trope: Difference between revisions

** The UHF TV tropes were largely broken by multiple factors including improved TV receivers, a steady loss of high-UHF spectrum from terrestrial OTA TV to mobile telephone companies, a loss of OTA viewers in general to cable, satellite and Internet – but the furthest-reaching disruption has been DTV, which relies on digital compression and forward error correction schemes which perform very poorly under the impulse noise conditions of low-VHF channels and reasonably well on UHF. The channel that no broadcaster wants today isn't UHF 83 (which no longer exists) but digital VHF 2.

** The digital transition means that many science fiction works that have the video message from some twenty-fifth century alien civilisation fade into a mess of analogue static (or "snow") and vanish now look badly dated in the early twenty-first century. A digital station's fading signal actually looks perfect for a while (due to error correction), then the whole thing abruptly goes off a "digital cliff", pixellating and freezing dead in its tracks. No middle ground. Until the MPEG standard was introduced in the 1990s, no one anticipated what the compressed video would look like when DTV abruptly starts breaking up (it disintegrates into distinctive 8x8 pixel "macroblocks" and freezes)... so the old pattern of a signal degrading gracefully into static now looks about as dated as a stuck record, a stuck record, a stuck record... um, sorry about that.

== Music ==