Billion Dollar Handout To Upgrade TVs 663
db32 writes "SFGate has the story of the cutoff date for those rabbit ear antennas that some of us grew up with (Feb. 19, 2009). Now while the story of analog vs. digital TV has been beaten to death, still I think there is something more here. 'The Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration... said it is setting aside $990 million to pay for the boxes. Each home can request up to two $40 coupons for a digital-to-analog converter box, which consumer electronics makers such as RCA and LG plan to produce.' Beyond my disdain for most TV to begin with, I am blown away that with all of our current problems — homelessness and crime on the home front, war fighting and terrorism abroad — our government is seriously going to spend this much money on upgrading peoples' televisions."
already compensated for (Score:4, Interesting)
The weird thing is that the sales tax goes to the state not the feds, so it's nets out as a giant shift of funds from fed to the states.
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:5, Interesting)
Good (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a good idea to keep signals available to current TV owners.
Re:Makes perfect sense (Score:3, Interesting)
They can't sell it off until they move the current transmitters off. The receivers don't matter at all.
Basically, this is the government spending a billion dollars so that the few people in the US who still watch over-the-air TV on old TVs can still watch it in January 2009. (Recent TVs have converters built in; most people get their TV over Cable and Satellite.) Ironically, the people in that situation are probably the ones who care the least about their TV.
Why is it the government's job to make sure people can still watch TV when the television converts to a new standard, but it wasn't the government's job to buy a new CD player for everybody when the CD took over from Vinyl records?
Sure, they'll raise more than $1B money by auctioning off the spectrum. But, the question ought to be whether buying TV converters is the best use of that $1B. Why not use it to combat global warming, fund ethanol research, help find a cure for AIDS or reform the patent system?
The reason the federal deficit is so huge is that most people don't bat an eye at this sort of spending.
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:4, Interesting)
To you a gaming console may be useless crap, to someone else it may be a fantastic release from their long day working at a manufacturing plant building tractors to work the fields. Without said console they may little fun and their quality of life decreases.
Are books useless? They don't contribute anything meaningful in a physical product sense... so surely they're useless crap too?
It's a slippery slope when you try to start judging the 'worth' of items based purely on whether you 'need' them to survive.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
I paid $200 for mine. (Score:5, Interesting)
We don't have cable TV or satellite TV and we don't want it. I bought the Samsung unit to interface to a 32-inch Sony CRT television that is about twelve years old.
All the stations in my area, save one, are already broadcasting both analog and digital. With digital, I get dramatically better picture quality, though it's harder to use because you tend to have to re-tune the antenna (see below) when you change channels, particularly between UHF and VHF (those distinctions persist into the digital realm, too).
It takes some getting used to. When signals are weak, your TV displays weird freezing and pixellation, and the sound stutters. It's quite disconcerting at first.
Somebody awhile back wrote that with digital broadcast TV, you either get a perfect display of the channel on your screen, or you get no image or sound at all. That's just not true. You always have to deal with the freezing, stuttering, distorted audio and pixellation, although if you are persistent, you can learn how to tune in each station correctly and the breakup happens far less often.
And by the way, you still need the rabbit ears. Broadcast digital TV requires an antenna--the same kind of antenna required for broadcast analog TV.
The main reason that the US government is starting this program is two-fold. First, broadcast television is where most citizens (who don't have cable or satellite) still get their news, and being able to hear the news daily is considered a part of participating in democracy. Second, Congress mandated the cessation of analog broadcast TV at the end of 2009, so Congress is placing a burden on some (mostly poor) citizens who could become disenfranchised from the democracy through not being able to watch news broadcasts on their TV as a direct result of Congress' actions.
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cheap Digital to Analog Converters Are Availabl (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, this is chump change... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hunters and gatherers "work" way less than you. 20 hours a week is the number that comes to mind, but it has been 10 years since I picked up my BA in Anthropology.
apples and oranges (Score:2, Interesting)
second and more important is the source of this money, its essentially coming from fees from the ftc operating companies that is supposed to be used for ftc related stuff. Congress itself probably wastes alot more of non-earmarketed money on donuts and parking...