February 2009 - Posts
By George Lewis, NBC News Correspondent
In San Diego, they’re bringing down the curtain on 60 years of broadcast history just before midnight tonight.
KFMB-TV, a pioneer television station that first took to the air on May 16, 1949, will switch off its signal on Channel 8 for the last time. The station, a CBS affiliate, will pull the plug in the middle of “Late Night with David Letterman.” But KFMB-TV isn’t going out of business; it’s one of four San Diego stations changing from analog transmission to digital under federal rules that will free up the airwaves for other purposes.
All told, 421 U.S. television stations will sign off analog broadcasts tonight, affecting only viewers with who get their television on conventional receivers the old-fashioned way: over the air, through antennas. Previously, 220 other stations in Hawaii, Wilmington, N.C. and Chico-Redding, Calif. made the changeover. Customers who subscribe to cable or satellite TV won’t notice any changes at all.
Still, the outfit that brings you the ratings, the Nielsen Co., estimates that 6.5 million homes nationwide are unprepared because they don’t have newer digital sets or haven’t purchased converters for their older TVs. (In San Diego, the largest television market with the majority of stations terminating analog broadcasts tonight, it’s estimated that 65,000 households receiving over-the-air TV are not ready for the transition.)
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By John Baiata, NBC News’ Senior Editor
I blame Swanson.
When the venerable American food company rolled out its latest product in 1953, two household appliances – the freezer and the television, were becoming commonplace. The marriage of convenience between the two resulted in a bastard progeny - the frozen TV dinner.
Marketed as a way for Americans to enjoy their meals while they basked in the warm glow of the cathode rays emanating from their television sets, the Swanson TV dinner was an instant hit. Nearly four generations on, the sins of Gerry Thomas (the man credited for inventing both the product and the name for Swanson) are now being visited upon media-saturated Americans everywhere.
Televisions in eating establishments are as ubiquitous these days as battered stock portfolios. What started as a sensible business model for owners of sports bars and pubs to lure more couch potatoes out of their dens, has devolved into a trend more invasive than any fungal infection.
They're everywhere.
Airports. Check-out lines. Waiting rooms. Then, the final straw: restaurants. The National Restaurant Association, in a 2007 survey, estimated that 69 percent of casual dining establishments, and 50 percent of fine dining establishments offered televisions for customer entertainment. Make it stop.
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By Al Henkel, NBC News Producer
LONE GROVE, Okla. – It's the insulation in the trees that directs you where to go when you cover a tornado.
More than the twisted siding, or trees down, or flashing emergency lights after dark – tornados always, and I mean always, leave the pink insulation found in your attic and inside the walls of your house everywhere. You’ll see it plastered to the smallest twigs on trees, flapping in the wind on the points of barbed wire, and hidden in places only to resurface weeks or months later.
There's a lot of insulation in the trees here in Lone Grove, Okla. A tornado with winds estimated at 170 mph ripped through Lone Grove just after dark Tuesday night – destroying dozens of homes in its path and leaving at least nine dead.
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