Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyororin
I`ll roll my eyes at them here just as I would in real life. 
This has been planned for at least 5 years. When we bought our current television 5 years ago, they were already doing a countdown. I am pretty sure they extended it once also.
If you applied, you were able to get the money back that you spent on a tuner - but even without filling out a form, you can pick up a cheap tuner for less than 5000yen (I spotted them on sale for 2000yen last week...). It isn`t necessary to change the antenna, so that is all you need to spend.
As for the hotels - all they need to do is get a splitter unit for about 8000yen, hook it to the tuner, and it can be run to all the rooms.
The quality difference between analog and digital is so incredibly clear I find it hard to imagine someone not wanting the improvement...
As Japan doesn`t do cable in the way that the US does, I think it`s very hard to make a comparison of media consumption. Most people in Japan DO watch broadcast television. Other viewing services are very much a niche market. |
Yes, seems they offered cheap digital tuners for terrestrial reception to national market.
I found in the Net a depiction of a combined BS/terrestrial digital tuner :
HVT-BT200 produced by I-O Data
In my region authorities started experimental terrestrial broadcasting of digital TV signal about 3 months ago. And quality of picture ( I have a television set with built-in terrestrial digital tuner) is still much worse than I can get from my digital satellite TV set-top box ...