Thanks to a tip from Art at the office, Cruft Manor is now a viewer of Funimation Channel, a free 24 hour a day anime channel.

Here you see a typical anime scene with a father, ready for work in tie and sunglasses, talking to his daughter in bed while the kimono-wearing mother drives by in a mini-car.

Anime has become quite popular with young Zoe and this is viewed as a huge step forward in increasing the amount of TV watched.

With the transition to digital television, many new channels are enabled. The Funimation Channel is channel 18.3 with a digital tuner if you live in Los Angeles.

Don't know about digital TV? The government's explanation ain't exactly clear.

Here's the basics:

Our beloved FCC decided to move us all to digital over the air television. What that means is that local TV stations are given a new, digital channel to use to prepare for the turn off on analog TV in 2009.

Right now, a TV broadcast uses up 6MHz of bandwidth, what you think of as a channel, to distribute the signal. We don't use adjacent channels to help avoid interference. That's why there is usually (but not always) a gap between channel numbers on the dial.

With digital TV, a station gets the same 6MHz of bandwidth, but due to digital magic, 19.3 Mb/s of data can be transmitted. To put that in perspective, it's roughly the same as 10 broadband DSL lines at the same time.

The TV station can break up that bandwidth any way they want with different channels. Here in LA, KSCI puts their main Asian TV broadcast on 18.1 and the Funimation Channel on 18.3. Other stations do similar things. In Los Angeles, KABC puts their High Defintion (HD) broadcast on 7.1, a news feed called ABC News Now on 7.2, and a 24/7 weather radar map on 7.3.

What most people don't realize is that you don't need a HDTV to get digital television.

All you need is an ATSC digital tuner to receive the new digital TV signals. They are much cheaper now, going for under $100 for a set-top type or for the computer saavy, an ATSC tuner for your computer.

Makes sense?

Posted by michael at July 22, 2006 09:15 AM