[Jeffhs]

Technology is changing almost literally at the drop of a hat these days, everywhere you look. Broadcast TV may well be discontinued for good eventually (but just when is anyone's guess), with all present OTA TV stations putting their signals on cable. This will also spell the end of "portable" television as we have known it since the first portables appeared on the US market in the 1950s. It is certainly possible to connect a portable TV to a 100+-foot-long cable (!) so that the set can be moved around the house (but who would want to deal with that long cable, not to mention the safety hazard it causes?), or, alternatively, cable outlets can be installed in every room of the house so that a portable TV can be hooked up anywhere the viewer wishes -- even on the front porch, patio, etc. if desired.

However, as I mentioned, TV technology, like everything else, is changing, like it or not. If and when (at this point it is much more "when" than if) broadcast TV ends in the US and all TV is distributed via cable, we will just have to deal with it. The days of watching OTA TV via converter boxes and antennas on older (pre-1990s) TVs are just about over, except for VK members and other antique/vintage TV collectors. Most homes today are wired for cable or satellite, so the market for OTA television antennas is not what it once was. The village in which I live is served by Time Warner Cable; most residents, myself included, are connected to cable via this cable operator. I see very few (and I mean very few) outdoor TV antennas here; those I do see are falling apart, losing elements in every wind/snowstorm we get here (I live near Lake Erie, so we get the wind right off the lake in the winter and sometimes the gusts are quite high, on the order of 40 mph or more) and are becoming real eyesores.

Over-the-air television, IMHO, will eventually disappear in this country, as I said earlier, being replaced by cable and/or satellite services, although a few people I've talked to (my barber, for one, who lives almost literally on Lake Erie) have expressed displeasure with the latter because of reception issues during inclement weather -- for example, one other person with whom I spoke recently told me her family's satellite service goes absolutely blank when the dish gets covered with snow, when it rains, etc. I suggested to her that they switch to cable, but she told me she wasn't sure whether Time Warner will run cable down her street in a rural area of Geauga County, Ohio. My barber recently switched to AT&T U-Verse TV service from satellite for the same reasons (reception issues in bad weather).

We must face facts -- OTA television's days are numbered. Just when TV stations will turn to cable exclusively I don't know, but I am sure the day is coming. VK member Radiotvnut in Meridian, Mississippi has mentioned that the cable system in his area will cease analog delivery of channels 2 through twelve eventually (some time next year), and I see most other cable operators following suit. This means that, sooner rather than later, all TV will be not only digital (as it is today), but available only through cable, with over-the-air service becoming a relic of a bygone era -- not unlike the NTSC analog television broadcasting standard, which was abolished in 2009 and replaced by ATSC digital TV on June 12 of that year.

Our children's children will, in all likelihood, have no memory of OTA TV, as by that time (a generation or so from now) I am sure broadcast television will have ended here. Even televisions with "dials" and picture tubes are unheard of to today's kids; a nationally-syndicated comic strip, "Mother Goose and Grimm", in today's newspaper (the Lake County, Ohio News-Herald) drives that point home exceedingly well, IMHO. Grimm (the dog) and a cat are shown in the first panel in front of a TV set; Grimm asks the cat "What are you watching?" The cat answers, "I don't know, some stupid program." Grimm then asks the cat why he doesn't change the channel. "I can't," the cat answers. "They said 'don't touch that dial.'" In the last panel, Grimm whispers to the cat, "What's a dial?" The cat replied, "I don't know."

That was as good a commentary on the shift in technology from dials to buttons on televisions as I've ever read, and it applies to today's children very well. Kids today do not, by and large, know life before digital (ATSC) television, growing up or having grown up with that standard and seeing a television in their parents' living room that is completely devoid of dials (only buttons on the front or side of the set), and with a flat screen instead of a picture tube (what we VK folks call CRTs). If a teenage kid, knowing only life with DTV and flat panel televisions, saw an old, large NTSC-standard TV with a picture tube screen and knobs and dials (including, of course, the one that goes "clunk-clunk-clunk" to change the channel -- what we VKers know as the tuner) today, he or she would almost certainly be amazed that people actually used to watch television on these things.