Senate Passes Another Bill To Delay Digital TV Transition 318
An anonymous reader tips news that the US Senate has passed another bill to delay the transition to digital TV. This is the second such bill to pass the Senate; the first was narrowly defeated in the House. The new version has an important difference — it would allow the transition to take place gradually over the four-month period between the original transition date (February 17th) and the extended date (June 12th). TV stations around the country could choose when they wanted to make the change, allowing those who have already begun plans to stop analog transmission to continue their shut-down operations.
Great (Score:2, Interesting)
PLEASE stop (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How much MORE is this costing us? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing besides the pay for the senators that should be doing something else.
It's all paid for out of the sale price of the freed spectrum. And that price isn't changing.
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What bothers me a lot more about all of this is that, barely mentioned as an aside during transition conversation, is that many channels will be moving frequencies of their digital stations during the transition.
Every single local station in Austin has a digital broadcast already. I receive them all wonderfully with my little antenna plugged into my Dish Network DVR, so I can tune three channels at once (two satellite, one OTA).
However - I only have a UHF antenna. If the digital broadcasts move back to their old, analog slots on transition day, then
1) All my presets break.
2) I might lose any stations that move back into VHF.
That means folks like me, who are already "prepared" for the transition, might have problems too. Those are all problems I can solve (only Fox is a VHF station in Austin on analog, and I can live without). But what about all the people with converter boxes that needed help getting them set up? Are we all going to have to make rounds with our friends & families to rescan channels to find the new locations?
This really just isn't clear at all. I wish they would work this out by shifting markets one at a time, perhaps starting on the east coast and working west, so it's not the whole country having problems all at once. And that's why I think a slower transition makes more sense.
The REAL cost of delaying the switch. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How much MORE is this costing us? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. But IT WILL WORK.
We switched to digital TV long ago in Finland (Honestly, I can't understand how you guys in the promised land of TV can be so far behind in this matter. What the hell is taking you so long?). It was delayed once due to not enough people having bought tuners. Then, they noticed that after the delay a lot of people still hadn't bought but didn't delay it more. And guess what? Within the last few weeks before the old broadcasts ending, the rest of the people bought them.
Why would they have bought the tuners earlier? The longer you wait, the cheaper the technology gets and the better tuner you can buy. We bought our digibox well before we would have needed to but if we had bought one on last possible occasion, there would have been better models on the market for the same price...
Re:ONE question (Score:5, Interesting)
It is Clearwire that has a vested interest in this delay. They are attempting to roll out WiMax service to compete with the broadband 4G service Verizon is planning to offer on the freed up analog frequencies.
And guess which company one of the executives on Obama's DTV transition team works for? That's right, Clearwire...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/01/4g-war-conflict-of-interests-loom-behind-possible-dtv-delay.ars [arstechnica.com]
Re:Going postal (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I predicted this years ago (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:How much MORE is this costing us? (Score:3, Interesting)
>We switched to digital TV long ago in Finland (Honestly, I can't
>understand how you guys in the promised land of TV can be so
>far behind in this matter.
My experience, from living in various countries, is that the US is generally a bit behind the curve when it comes to consumer electronics technology, such as tv. We do tend to have more interesting things to watch on our tvs though.
They should switch off analog today. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:If you don't like it... (Score:4, Interesting)
The real solution is to stop voting for incumbents. Nothing's going to change until we get rid of career politicians.
If they got to Congress, they already are career politicians.
Re:Oh, yeah, that'll work (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand a station can turn around and say "we have already made all the arrangements to switch and can't rely on the hardware even still being there after the 17th of Feb."
Re:How much MORE is this costing us? (Score:3, Interesting)
I might lose any stations that move back into VHF.
This is unlikely.
Very few stations are choosing to move their digital signal to any of the VHF-Low (2-6) channels, and only a very few UHF antennas won't get good enough reception on VHF-Hi (7-13).
Austin has only Fox choosing a VHF-Hi channel (7) as their final digital frequency. See here [rabbitears.info] for more information on the final channel assignments and when and how they expect to make the change.
Re:What is the problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
They're not free because even with the coupon, you still have to pay $15 or so to get a box, so I suspect many "unneeded" coupons will never be redeemed.
And they're not your tax dollars because the proceeds for the program came from the sale of the reclaimed RF spectrum.
Are you prepared for CHANNEL REASSIGNMENTS? (Score:4, Interesting)
The delay is justified, for two reasons. First, the coupon program was bungled, and running out of coupons shows that consumers are NOT clueless, MORE have responded than expected, because they are doing their best to prepare.
Second, as nearly as I can tell, nothing is being done to prepare consumers for the channel reassignments that will occur along with the analog shutdown. A significant number of stations will be changing their assigned frequency for digital transmission, and quite a lot of them will be changing from UHF to VHF.
At the very least you'll need to do a channel rescan. If I were a station like WHDH, the big Channel 7 NBC affiliate in Boston, I'd long since have posted directions on my website telling people about this and, if possible, telling them how to do a manual channel rescan. But they haven't.
Now, if you have a honkin' big old UHF/VHF rooftop antenna left over from the eighties, and you buy a converter box, you'll be fine. But if you bought one of those nice, compact, inexpensive "HDTV antenna" they've been selling for several years now, that, my friends, is a UHF antenna and you'll lose any digital stations that move to VHF. Maybe not, if they're powerful enough. But I don't know how on earth you can find out before the actual moment arrives.
And if you don't have a big honkin' VHF antenna on your roof already, February 17th is not a great time to be up there installing one.
So, check antennaweb.org [antennaweb.org] for those channel reassignments, because I suspect some of the smug digerati are not quite as prepared for the transition as they think they are.
Re:colossal failure of broadcast media (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How much MORE is this costing us? (Score:3, Interesting)
>>>happens to be a portion of our tax dollars.
False. TV channels 52 to 69 were sold-off for around 1 billion dollars, and that is the money being used to upgrade poor & middle ncome televisions NOT taxpayer dollars. You would known this is you got off you Libertarian wacky tobaccy and did some actual RESEARCH. (Yeah I now - you thought after you graduated, you wouldn't need to do that anymore. Wrong!)
If my TV, VCR, and DVR stops working on February 17 and I don't receive my 80 dollars assistance to upgrade, thus turning six hundred dollars of equipment into worthless junk that display/record white statics, a couple of the politicians are going to get Fired next election even if it means running for Congress myself.