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). 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.