Forgotten Trope: Difference between revisions

* Fictional TV stations, if portrayed as weak and struggling North American independents, were invariably placed on undesirable channels at the highest end of the UHF TV dial. A weak signal was displayed with "snow" as an interference pattern over the image, which represented white noise in the analogue broadcast era. [["Weird Al" Yankovic]] does this with "U-62" in ''[[UHF]]'' (1989) and David Cronenberg does this with "CIVIC-TV 83" in ''[[Videodrome]]'' (1983). This trope was 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 to cable, satellite and Internet – but the largest disruption has been digital HDTVDTV, which relies on digital compression and forward error correction schemes which perform very poorly under the impulse noise conditions of low-VHF channels. The channel that no broadcaster wants today isn't UHF 83 (which no longer exists) but VHF 2. The channel most suited to be a joke "TV station" in comedy might not be OTA TV at all, but the "community access channel" which the cable companies are required to provide as a condition to obtain their licence. That channel is routinely filled with video of town council meetings and other low-budget, eminently forgettable but local fare.