Forgotten Trope: Difference between revisions
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* 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). 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 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.
** 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. The digital signal contains error correction bits, so looks perfect until the whole thing goes off a "digital cliff", pixelates and freezes dead in its tracks. Until the MPEG standard was introduced in the 1990s, no one anticipated this... so the old pattern of a signal degrading gracefully now looks about as dated as a stuck record, a stuck record, a stuck record... sorry about that.
== Music ==
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