Not So Fast On DTV Switchover (Bumped and Updates)
Feb 4th, 2009 | 8 responses
UPDATE: After an earlier delay the House has voted to approve the delay until June 12th. However broadcasters will still be able to cut things off after February 17th, they simply moved the deadline to June. As a practical matter I doubt any station will cut off analog signals early because they would potentially lose viewers.
It looks like the big change to digital television may not be happening as fast as we thought. The Senate has tonight passed a bill to delay the change from February to June. The House is expected to follow suit and the President has indicated he would support the bill.
I’m not sure how I feel about the proposal. On the one hand it certainly doesn’t cost me anything for them to delay, although it does appear it will cost the televison stations something for the delay (PBS alone says they would lose more than $ 20 million in the delay).
I also understand that there have been some problems in the transition and that some people have not been able to get their coupons for the purchase of the convertor boxes. So overall I think I am ok with the delay.
But at the same time this does seem like a symptom of our ‘nobody is to blame’ society. People have known, or should have known, about the transition for over a year and yet we still see people on the news acting surprised that a change is taking place.
Again I am fine with having the delay but I also wonder about the people who didn’t seem to know anything was happening.
8 Responses to “Not So Fast On DTV Switchover (Bumped and Updates)”
What was the given reason for needing to extinguish free-airing and why did this decision get made during the Bush administration?
Sil – the real question is why is it now being delayed? The answer is at the request of an official Obama adviser who has very, very vested interests for his company from this delay occurring.
I'm sure most know, but Hawaii has already switched and I used my little digital converter box tonight for the first time. (Don't watch much TV.) The picture is far better than my old analog one.
No, I asked for an illustration of a past decision. I expect that before we move onto discussion of what's happening now. Unlike spindoctors, I like to understand the origin of things before I move on to talking about why we should talk about something else that diverts talk away from the origin of things…
I wonder if big cable and big sat. have anything to do with the delay. There are not many things that are free to the consumer today. This is going to be a big deal. I'm sure it will shake the cable industry right to the core. How many TV's are out there that are not dtv ready and are on outdoor antennas? I would like to think that there are more of us ready than not, so lets make the change , pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off.
“I also wonder about the people who didn’t seem to know anything was happening”
Do you believe instead that Obama and the Dems would let communication with (and exploitation of) their voters to be disrupted?
In Tampa all station switched over before the first deadline. The local PBS stations now offer up to four stations after the switch to digital.
Well many stations are already broadcasting in digital, the issue is when they dump analog entirely.