Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Others Fined Over Digital TV Notices 171
Ian Lamont writes "The FCC has fined 11 retailers and television manufacturers for violating rules relating to the 2009 digital TV transition. Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, Sears, Kmart, and Wal-Mart supposedly failed to place notices near analog-only TV sets warning customers that the sets did not have digital tuners. In part, the required notice reads: 'This television receiver has only an analog broadcast tuner and will require a converter box after February 17, 2009, to receive over-the-air broadcasts with an antenna because of the Nation's transition to digital broadcasting. Analog-only TVs should continue to work as before with cable and satellite TV services, gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD players, and similar products.' The fines total $6.6 million."
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Re:Just the cost of doing business (Score:5, Insightful)
These fines should be based on some percentage of the profits from the activity in question. And that percentage should be over 100%.
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For your scenario to make sense, they would not only have to sell enough TV's to create that much profit, but they'd have to sell them to people who would not have bought one if those signs had actually been placed on the TV's. Considering how few people actually care about over-the-air programming, I find that rather unlikely.
Re:Just the cost of doing business (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, how's that cable gonna work on a boat, or camping? There's still a good market for cheap TVs.
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I never said these people don't exist. In fact, I specifically made an allowance for just such individuals by saying "considering how few people actually care about over-the-air programming". In other words, while there are still people out there who do care about OT
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A very long cord? Just a thought... :-)
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A very long cord? Just a thought... :-)
Yeah, but just when the show gets to the good part, someone will drag an anchor over it. :-)
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Re:Just the cost of doing business (Score:4, Insightful)
These fines should be based on some percentage of the profits from the activity in question. And that percentage should be over 100%.
In fact, in most of these stores I have personally seen the warning signs that are required, so they are not skirting the issue. Most likely, a few individual stores failed to properly update their signage according to the corporate directions and that's resulting in the fine. The most likely result will either be store manager firings or at best, a massive training effort to prevent this from happening in the future.
Furthermore the constitutionality of intentionally harming the profitability of a business as a penalty is suspect. Fines generally must be the same for anyone who violates the rules, and not based on percentages of facts about them.
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Furthermore the constitutionality of intentionally harming the profitability of a business as a penalty is suspect. Fines generally must be the same for anyone who violates the rules, and not based on percentages of facts about them.
The legal idea that nobody should be permitted to profit from a crime or tort is fairly deeply ingrained into law. On what do you base the idea that a fine cannot be based on a percentage?
Consider the idea of treble (300%) damages for willful patent infringement.
Arguably, fines that are not scaled to the individual are inherantly unfair and ineffective as a deterrant.
Of course, we could just structure the law to get the same effect without the percentages, such as make each individual sale of an ana
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This isn't a violation of law, it's a violation of code. There is a significant difference. Consider it analogous to the violation of traffic movement code vs. an actual criminal offense like theft.
FCC/FTC violations, just like traffic violations can escalate to criminal offenses in certain rare situations but it's rather unlikely this will happen here.
And still, on your example, the damage percentage is not based on a fact of the punished party, it's based on the value of what they stole or used without
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I think you have missed the point. It really doesn't matter if these are fines for a code violation, for a criminal law violation or a happy bloogle day tax.
Fines based on a per-location basis is a boon for businesses that have large locations and the death of a mom and pop establishment. If the fine is (for example) $1000 per location, the ultra-mega-TV mart that sold 1000 TVs out of it's 10 acre warehouse owes $1000. $10 profit/TV times 1000 TVs - $1000 = $9000 profit (instead of $10000). It's a 10% tax
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And if a top-dog did make the decision, they already had someone's head ready in mind to roll anyway, to cover for their decision. A scapegoat who couldn't prove they decided to do it.
Re:Just the cost of doing business (Score:5, Informative)
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So adding that up, Sears(1.1)+KMart(1.1)+Syntax-Brillian(1.3)+Wal-Mart(.992) = $4.492 million. Which leaves another $2.1 million to split between 7 other companies. Wal-Mart probably makes over $6.6 million in electronics in a
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I challenge this idea that 6 million dollar fines are just considered a cost of doing business
Right, agreed; it's more along the lines of a 'license', which is also a cost of doing business. So, let me get this straight, you figure this was a goof-up, right, and 'heads will roll'? Let's think about that.
For one thing, it seems likely that the 6 million in fines is portioned out to the scofflaws in relation to their size and/or sales. With me so far? Now, what do you figure the odds are that the relevant 'planners', etc, at SIX big chains, ALL made the same 'mistake', or, worse yet, that all six c
What did you expect? (Score:5, Funny)
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Their shareholders should be up in arms about the companies wasting the chance to upsell customers on a converter box, but they're too stupid and lazy to care either.
Re:What did you expect? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oddly enouugh, Tesco (Walmarts competitor in the UK) are running an advertising campaign on TV just now where this is the exact premise. "Buy our budget mushrooms, they're ugly as sin but are cheap and going in a pie anyway". Novel approach.
How about all the "HD" antennas? (Score:2, Interesting)
At least addressing an analog TV doesn't require climbing up on your roof.
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The stations who've stayed on the low-VHF section of the band have found that they have LOWER performance (all other things being equal) on their digital transmitters vs. their analog ones, on their old VHF frequencies, for various reasons.
Most of the large network engineering departments figured out a number of reasons why this happens, and mandated that the rest of their affiliates instead plan to move to UHF.
Stations are indeed moving to UHF,
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I don't go to Best Buy anymore.
And where weren't they doing this? (Score:1, Informative)
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FUD permeates analog-to-digital TV switchover (Score:1)
And will any of this $$$... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, oh, why didn't the government ban imports of analog-only TVs after a certain date (say 1-2 years ago)? I mean this would have solved 95% of the problem...
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Those are UK Freeview tuners. Which are cheaper specifically because they do not receive HD. The US went for HD from the start, which costs more initially, but it also means that we won't have to toss out a bunch of electronics all over again to maybe get HD by 2012, like will happen in the UK. Some of us have been getting HD for over four years now.
Sure, a lot of the programming is up-converted and window-boxed (new studio equipment isn't cheap and can only be manufactured so fast, not to mention the SD r
Re:And will any of this $$$... (Score:5, Informative)
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I never said the converter box tuners output HD. But they must still receive and decode HD signals. Why? Because that's the only thing out there for them to receive. (Did you see where I used the word "down-convert"?) Most US stations are only broadcasting their main programming over an HD signal.
Freeview boxes have no capability to receive an HD signal. (In fact, the UK hasn't even finalized the specs on HD yet!) The UK will have to simulcast an SD signal for the old SD-only Freeview boxes "forever". Once
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I'm sure there are markets with no SD broadcasts but this is not universal, and I would definitely wager that it's not "most" stations as you say.
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You two are talking about different meanings of the word "bandwidth". It's the internet bandwidth which is why BBC HD over internet will have problems becoming reality any time soon. In fact, even non-HD BBC over the internet is causing troubles right now.
OTA doesn't take up internet bandwidth. It uses broadcast bandwidth, which is one-way only, but just fine for this purpose. In the USA, that's 6MHz of spectrum bandwidth, which transports about 19Mbits/sec of data bandwidth. That's about twice the maximum
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Bandwidth, when speaking about transmitted signals, refers to the chunk of airwaves taken by that signal. TV and FM take up a huge band of frequencies while sending relatively little data. For example, FM radio stations are spaced 200khz apart, so for each station there is 200khz worth of frequencies consumed for a single audio signal. Therefore there is a push by some to drop them, and re-allocate the air waves in a more efficient manner.
Re:And will any of this $$$... (Score:5, Informative)
Not every HDTV channel has a multiplexed SDTV version of that same channel, and requiring one would use up bandwidth, degrading the primary HDTV channel's picture mode (i.e. down from 1080i to 720p).
NTIA at the US-DOC has a very readable document listing the requirements for a CECB [doc.gov]--a Coupon-Eligible Converter Box. It's too bad that the NTIA didn't "lock-down" the design more as CECBs will have differing feature sets (i.e. program guide, S-Video, etc.)
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Wrong. Native resolution of 720p is 1280x720. Native resolution of 1080i is 1920x1080. From a pure number of pixels perspective, 720p has 921,600 pixels x 60 Hz = 55,296,000 pixels of data per second. 1080i has 2,457,600 pixels x 60 Hz / 2 (interlaced) = 73,728,000 pixels of data per second, requiring 33% more bandwidth.
Of course, this doesn't take into account MPEG compression, but even with compression, 1080i requires a lot more ban
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Re:And will any of this $$$... (Score:5, Insightful)
And there is the seldom mentioned problem that analog TV viewers tend to be folks living on small incomes, fixed incomes, or both. They don't necessarily have even $20 to spare.
I'm curious how well digital is going to work in my area which has a lot of hills and where folks tend to get marginal coverage. Analog coverage around here used to be described as "one and a half stations". Rumor has it that digital coverage is not as good as it was with analog. Oh yeah, cable coverage around here is minimal. I have cable. Folks in the next towns out from Burlington don't have cable (or DSL, but that's another story). And not everyone has a clear line of sight to satellites.
The US DTV rollout has been an on-going shambles. It looks like they are going to procede with it whether digital works or not. I wouldn't bet that they don't turn analog back on about 30-60 days after they turn it off. There are possibly going to be a LOT more complaints than anyone anticipates.
I'm not against digital, but the entire roll out in the US has been a textbook study in how NOT to manage a technology upgrade. We'll see what happens in about ten months.
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Unfortunately, that's not always the case.
Here, when conditions are perfect the OTA picture is great. if it's windy, raining, or there's too many active butterflies, I have to switch back to analog to see anything at all. Of course, that won't be an option much longer.
I have satellite, but sometimes tape one program and watch another OTA.
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They can't turn analog back on (Score:2)
They can't turn analog back on because a lot of the changes being made (e.g. stations changing channels, stations doing flash cuts, etc) depend on other changes, and many of those depend on the way digital works. For example there are a set of specific interference avoidance technical requirements to avoid one station interfering with another. These rules differ for analog and digital. So the actual operating frequencies had to change. Quite many of the stations will be switching to an all new channel d
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There don't seem to be any digital stations available yet where I live. I receive most of my television stations through a privately owned translator which is on a mountain top between here and Phoenix, which is the nearest large city. It is only broadcasting in analog. According to the dtv2009.gov website, "currently there is no requirement for translators and low-power stations to convert to digital." It sounds like they may be allowed to continue broadcasting in NTSC analog for a while longer.
I have g
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Easy for you to say. If you were broke because, say, you had several kids to feed on a low income - or you were an invalid or otherwise disabled, you'd probably appreciate having TV to occupy the kids, or soothe your own boredom or depression.
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Well, if you fail to see that, then it just demonstrates how little you understand about humans. Do you never look for distractions or entertainment? When you have a problem, do you spend 100% of your time and undivided attention facing that problem head-on? Do you spend all your time trying to earn more money?
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I know we're on a slightly different system here, but they start at about £10 which is equivalent to $20, half the value of the vouchers that your government is dishing out for the switchover!
As I mentioned elsewhere, that was probably a below-cost loss leader [slashdot.org]. Excluding that factor, the "true" retail price- including even the slimmest profit margin- is probably nearer £20 than £10.
Re:And will any of this $$$... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If one company is selling them at $60 and one is selling them at $50, the guy selling for $50 is actually selling at half the price for the consumer.
Re:And will any of this $$$... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they did ban the manufacture, import or interstate shipment [dtvfacts.com] of analog-only TV sets a little over a year ago, which was two years before the analog broadcasting cutoff. That doesn't mean that there weren't six months or more of analog-only TV sets in the warehouses. And this also applies to VCRs, DVRs, and any other device which has an NTSC tuner, but no ATSC tuner.
Also, this only applies to sets with a tuner. Tuner-less sets (aka "monitors") are exempt.
Thrift store TVs (Score:5, Interesting)
Goodwill and oter thrift stores (and maybe even pawn shops) better hope they don't get noticed for not putting the notice on the TVs themselves. I know that Goodwill has just been sticking up the notice in a random place on the wall or something. And right now thrift stores and pawn shops are probably the main place to find analog-only TV sets. But hey, as long as they have a video input, they're still useful for video games. And they will still work with an external tuner.
On the other hand, I've gotten two satellite tuners with ATSC at thrift stores for ten bucks each. One even had a broken analog NTSC tuner, which I found amusing. Unfortunately I wasted another ten bucks because I didn't realize that the DirecTV H10 and H20 require a satellite subscription to receive ATSC. Bargain hunters, stay away from those two models!
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Wal*Mart: looked OK to me (Score:5, Interesting)
But my personal experience is that I've only seen those notices twice within the last year, and both times were in Wal*Marts. One was in Wisconsin, late last summer; the other in Massachusetts. I didn't see any notices at all when I was recently in Best Buy.
And: the day I received my converter coupons in the mail, which was February 29th--I must have been among the very first to get them--I called Wal*Mart to see if they had converter boxes; they said yes, I got there and they had a huge display of them in a featured location in the aisle just outside their electronics department, the pre-coupon price was $50, and they were ready and happy to process my $40 coupons.
Based on my highly scientific sample size of two, I don't see any indication that Wal*Mart is dragging its feet. Offhand I'd think they're making a good-faith effort to comply. If they haven't been getting the notices up I'd attribute it to general chaos and cluelessness, not to any systematic attempt to unload analog sets on unsuspecting customers.
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Is there some famous quote about malice and incompetence? I'm sure it applies to any of the retail chain stores that were fined.
That said, I want to know where these fines are going. That's our money after all, just like all the money that they are collecting by selling o
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My local Best Buy has been putting big white stickers that explain the situation (in BIG type) on the sides of analog-tuner TV boxes since February 2007. I've never noticed any signage in the TV area (I haven't really looked for the past several months either), but I do know that there has been some sort of hard-to-miss notification.
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You beat me to it. Dut then again i do pay taxes. But Wal Mart is much easier to avoid.
Why would they hesitate? (Score:2)
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Prolonging the agony (Score:5, Funny)
At least it sounds as if the US are going to yank the elastoplast off in one go and just switch in 2009. Here in the UK they're pussyfooting around by turning it off region by region over a 4 year period.
The TV ads are dumb - too: they're clearly designed by marketdroids who's aim in life is to establish "the Digital tick" logo and their cute little robot mascot as Brands - which is not the same as delivering factual information to people who - if they haven't got the message after 5 years - need a gentle tap with the cluebat.
Me, I'd do it like this:
(Burst of interference followed by black screen)
Voicover (the woman from "Weakest Link" or similar):
So take some personal responsibility and find out about what you need - and check that someone's sorting it all out for the little old lady next door, too. In fact, while you're at it, check that she's eating properly and her heater is working because if she's that isolated and can't even save up £30 for a Digibox, missing Eastenders for a week is going to be the least of her worries.
For pity's sake, people, its been in the news for the last 5 years and at the end of the day its only TV - its not like we're turning off the water supply or something!
...but then I was born with a defect in the gene responsible for political expediency.
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(I could be confusing this with the plan here in Canada; apologies for any incorrect facts; I'm on dialup this weekend, arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh [now, those bytes will cost me], and so doing much research into what I remember is impractical...)
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Keep in mind that the FCC was originally trying to get "full HD implementation" by 2002, which obviously never happened. Now it is 'digital broadcast' but not necessarily HiDef. And they've been 'discussing' it since at least 1996 that I can recall. When it became clear that 2002 wasn't going to work,
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the tv's will still work, duh (Score:4, Funny)
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And where does the money from the fines go? (Score:2)
Very doubtful!!!
So the consumer gets screwed and based on that screw job the legal system, whatever it is, then screws the screwers.
Ultimately the consumers get nothing and the advertisers have less audience.
So in the end the advertisers get screwed too.
I'm confused, Who benefits?
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Kinda like the inability to protest in many places these da
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Wow, the mods-on-crack really gravitated to this post.
Digital transition means "they" end up having complete control of TV? Hogwash.
Big Brother 16 in 1080p? The FCC has never mandated HDTV broadcasts, and even if they did, the converter boxes will downsample any HDTV broadcasts for display on a analog set.
Ham/CB banned? AM/FM banned? You're a fucking idiot and you should leave your
What - *Who* did *What*? (Score:3, Interesting)
The FCC did what now?
The FCC has the authority to regulate the use of a few communications-valuable portions of the RF spectrum.
To the best of my knowledge, they have no authority to regulate trade. We even have a similarly-named governmental TLA for that - The FTC.
Anyone care to 'splain it to me, by what stretch of the imagination fining retailers satisfies the goal of allocating spectrum for the greatest public good?
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By your logic, then the FDA shouldn't able to fine supermarkets for changing the ex
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Your knowledge is deficient. Congress provided the FCC with that authority when they enacted the All-Channel Receiver Act of 1962.
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The FCC does not "allocate spectrum for the greatest public good". The FCC allocates the spectrum according to guidelines laid down by Congress.
6.6 million? (Score:2)
Now $60M, or $600M, spread across them all would have gotten their attention and made a "Don't do this again" statement.
Anything else is just toothless posturing.
They'll make the money back (Score:2, Insightful)
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There, fixed that for ya. It amazes my how many people think the "government" has all this money and is some separate entity. Like, it's okay to sue the local township for $1M because you wore high heels in January and slipped on the ice. After all, you're only screwing "the government" out of $1M. In the end, you're truly screwing your friends and neighbors.
Linux TV-Tuners. (Score:2)
kill your television (yet another reason) (Score:4, Insightful)
every time I see places where consumer marketplaces have heavy handed intervention from government (read: not regulation to protect consumers, but rules or supports to direct consumer behavior), it seems there is something wrong. corporations a bit too close to the state.
in a healthy marketplace, if digital TV products and services can't out compete and win vs. the analog systems, then they would lose. period. if the government is going to come in and with the corporate-directed, lobby-directed practice of mandating a specific technology -- just because it works better for the business practice of some large companies -- well, this is not in most people's interest.
the truculent refusal to admit the changing nature of content distribution and actions like this with digital TV on the part of existing content and hardware companies has already has created a vibrant black market for their products. luckly many people are building alternatives...
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Oh Really? (Score:2)
Oh really? Cable systems are trying to switch off bandwidth-hogging analog as fast as they can too.
View from the trenches. (Score:2)
We had the signs on all our analog TVs since i started there a year and a half ago, and almost a year ago we stopped carrying analog sets altogether. We still have the notice up on the one analog VCR/DVD combo that we have a ton of overstock in...
Ive been fairly pleased with our stores small part in all this. Me and the other 6 people (very small store) who work i
320x240, 640x480 (Score:2)
I'll take that to mean you can't let go of that Packard Bell PC and 12" monitor from the Win 3.1 days.
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Depending where you live, you might already be able to get CBC in digital. Vancouver and Toronto have a number of digital broadcast channels including CBC.