Slashdot Mirror
DTV Coupon Program Out of Money
Thelasko writes "It appears that the US Government's digital converter box program is running out of money. If you sign up after the program runs out of money, you will receive your voucher if the program receives more funding. Older analog televisions will no longer work without a converter box after February 17."
They probably spent half the money on that spiffy website anyway.
You only need a converter box if you get your television via over-the-air broadcast and don't have a digital tuner built in. If you get your television via cable (with a cable box or no), satellite, FiOS, U-Verse, etc., you don't need a dtv converter box. On Feb. 17, nothing will change for you. If you get OTA broadcasts, and you're unsure if your television needs a box, if you have the ability to type in a hyphen or decimal point in the channel number on your TV, you hava digital tuner. Fo example, in the Los Angeles area market, if you can type in 11.1 (11-1), you will get Fox in both digital and HD via OTA broadcast. Your best bet if your'e unsure, however, is to look up if your TV has a digital tuner online on the equipment manufacturer's website.
Why do I need a new TV if my current one works just fine? Seems wasteful to me.
This summer, Congress will conduct hearings on the massive waste and fraud in the program surrounding scores of bogus vendors each selling tens of thousands of fictitious boxes, all with "valid" coupons.
Ibid.
Don't forget the approx 20,000,000,000 commercials.
Not like it matters. The program will get whatever extra money it needs. No way will the feds deprive Joe Bob of his basic right to free programming. Panem et circenses for the 21st century.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The converter boxes aren't that expensive, about as much as a new game, sure it sucks to be forced to buy new equipment but there are other things one can do besides watch TV if they are so unwilling to suffer the cost of the boxes.
This is true, my grandmother bought one for $30. Not too expensive. However, when I came home for Christmas, she asked me to hook the box up. She needed the TV to record soap operas on her VCR while she was at work. That is all she used it for (we're talking technologically inept middle of nowhere country folk here). Ok, so I run the coaxial cable into the back of the converter, then put the RCA cables into the input on the back of the VCR (which then turned into a coaxial cable to the back of her TV as her TV is 20 years old and that's all it has). Everything is working fine but as a side result, she can't program different channels because the converter box determines the channels. Ok, not a big deal to her.
... I tried a few other VCRs at my parent's house and they all seem to do it.
But then we record something and I notice a very peculiar thing with the color. I seem to recall that if you had put a DVD signal through a VCR, the color would modulate so that people couldn't dupe videos (or maybe there is a technical restriction). Anyway, she said she would put up with it but after watching 10 minutes of TV I wanted to throw the damned thing through the window.
So tell me, how do you record on these things to a VCR with no color modulation
My work here is dung.
New TVs are not that expensive.
New TVs are expensive. If you're living on less than $800 a month, that $100+ is going to be felt. Trust me. This is obvious to anyone who hasn't had money supplied to them by their parents for their entire lives...
Is someone living on $500 a month "entitled" to watch television for free? If so, why?
Because of this silly notion that "the people" own the airwaves...
Actually, it will work just fine...you just can't watch a digital signal without a converter. DVD's, VHS tapes, game consoles will all work just as before. The TV itself is fine...it's just YOU that's shit outta luck.
Collect some cans along the road and turn them in to buy your converter.
WTF? Over?
So the FCC made around 20 billion dollars auctioning off the spectrum, but only allocated 1.3 billion for the coupon program? At $40 /coupon, that's around 32 million coupons. I'm guessing there's more non-cable televisions than that. Something seems quite a bit wrong with the amount allocated.
AccountKiller
Not really a surprise. Voting against TV would be, politically, about as sensible as voting for the "Islamopedophile encouragement and anti-jesus act of 2009".
New TVs are not that expensive
WTF are you talking about? I paid a thousand dollars for mine! And not only that, throwing away a perfectly good TV is immorally wasteful, even if it's only a nineteen incher you paid a hundred bucks for.
The government is paying to fix a problem that THEY caused. You and your wife's $60k incomes togather may make a thousand bucks "chicken feed" but my forty grand and no wife can't afford to replace an otherwise perfectly good television.
Ask Gumby whose employer is being subsidized by the government by its giving Gumby a LINK card (making it possible to pay Gumby less; food stamps are a handout to the poor's employers) if he can easily afford that forty dollar converter box.
Its amazing how ignorant the upper middle class can be.
Free Martian Whores!
New TVs are not that expensive. Even pensioners could buy a new one. I don't think the government should be paying for any of this.
The Government, along with the major media conglomerates, would very much like to continue their effective propaganda campaign against US citizens. An easy way to do this is to is to continue providing lazy Americans with free TV in their house, ensuring that the message delivery system that is piped directly into homes stays intact.
It's quite brilliant, really. I am not a tinfoil hatter (don't even get me started on those "contrails kill!!" idiots) but I believe this.
New TVs are not that expensive. Even pensioners could buy a new one. I don't think the government should be paying for any of this.
It's very simple. Go back to the reasons for the "digital only" conversion. First, strike out the myth that it's to give HD. Digital HD. Second, remember that the market was not demanding digital TV.
So what's left? Two things. First, the government wanted to sell off the bandwidth that normal TV uses. Second, the *AA lobbies loved the idea of digital because they could put their "broadcast flag" in it and implement DRM.
Neither of these two reasons are in the public interest, and again, the market did not demand the conversion to digital TV. The Bush admin controlled FCC knew that they would have a lot of pissed off people if they forced people to buy new TV's so they came up with this converter box to pay for their hidden agendas.
No it won't. Because of something the government did.
If the US government decided all of a sudden to change from driving on the right hand side to the left hand side of the road, don't you think people would be rightfully pissed about having to buy a new car, or get theirs converted?
(Look! A car analogy that works!!)
This is the entertainment equivalent of that. Everybody's old TVs that work fine are being obsoleted, not by the market, but by the government saying, essentially, "Your old TV is now illegal."
Certain things you can get away with doing that, if it doesn't affect a majority of people. You can restrict handgun calibers to 0.30 and lower, and most people will say "Well, what do those gun freaks need all those .38 and .44 guns for, anyway?" and the government gets away with it.
Try to do it with TV or cars, and the 90+ percent of the population that's affected will be rather annoyed, to say the least.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I'd love to compare the current U.S. to the faltering Roman empire but there's a football game on. Has anyone seen my welfare check?
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
It probably has something to do with the massive amount of lead and various other environmentally hazardous material found in televisions: the gov't doesn't want it all in landfills. Especially, for that matter, right away: when TVs all stop working at once, everyone is going to dispose of their old ones immediately (not leave them laying around). Such a thing could overwhelm sanitation services (due to the weight of the things) temporarily.
Also, there are a LOT of people out there who don't like throwing things out. So there are still quite a few 30+ year old TVs out there with the analog 19 channel dials.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
1. Subscribe to newsletter
2. Read newsletter
3. ????
4. Profit!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
or people will start to read books.
If the converter box coupons help keep perfectly good CRT TVs out of the wastestream it sounds like money well spent.
(Relevent report on that from 60 Minutes)
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The bad part about digital TV is the method of transmission they used is inferior in some ways to analog TV. It requires a very strong signal to get any video at all, and it's very suspectible to multipath interference. Analog TV would degrade gracefully, so that if you didn't get a strong signal you could at least hear it, and see black and white video. Digital TV is all-or-none. Also, portable TV antennas no longer work (at least, not while you're moving), so you can't stick one in your car or your Sony Watchman. Digital broadcast TV is a pain at this point...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
The vouchers automatically expire after 90 days. I recall some doom and gloom about this program running out of money some time ago, based on the rate at which vouchers were being issued. Lots of people ordered them immediately, not realizing the expiration date, and discovered there wasn't much hardware you could spend them on yet. But since many of them weren't used that allocated money went back into the available pool again, just like your voucher will after it expires.
The main thing that's different now is that vouchers ordered recently won't expire before the DTV transition, so if the program runs out of money now there won't be a chance to recycle recently issued but unused vouchers until after the deadline.
So, an elderly person who, when they were working, saved up and got a perfectly good working television, now on a fixed income of $500 is told, "well, on top of the fact that you barely have enough money to feed yourself and your mobility problems keep you from hiking up the mountain or visiting the outdoors, we're now going to take your sole source of companionship, Your TV. Tough luck that you don't have the money to buy the latest and greatest television. Too bad your children are too busy commenting on Slashdot to actually visit you so you wouldn't need that television. I think you have a priority problem and you should get back to work, you lazy slob."
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Collect some cans along the road and turn them in to buy your converter.
I'd rather collect some TVs along the road and turn them into a sculpture of a triceratops.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I wonder if this has anything to do with it?
Scammers Exploit DTV Coupon Program
So, paying for another mode of reception doesn't insulate you from the DTV switch.
This is where you're confused. The citizens of this country shouldn't have had to pay *ANYTHING* to buy a converter. The spectrum was sold for BILLIONS of DOLLARS to third parties and being that the citizens OWN the spectrum and the government does not, the money gained by this sale should have gone directly to us. I promise you that the $80 in coupons (which I didn't even get and they won't replace even though they didn't send it in any trackable manner) won't cover what we should have been given.
It's sad that people don't understand the simple fact that we got fucked on this deal all around.
Besides, it's too late to be having this argument. When they reclaimed the spectrum, part of the deal was that people would still be able to watch broadcast TV without laying out for a new TV or bearing the full cost of a converter box. That was the deal. You can't just tell people something to get their consent to make changes, and then not follow through on your end of the bargain.
You forgot one important justification for the DTV changeover: ending a massively wasteful use of spectrum.
A single analog TV channel uses a 6 Mhz of spectrum. And most channels sit vacant to avoid interference. Just four channels--24hz--is enough bandwidth to run a full-fledged mobile 3G network. You tell me what's a smarter way to use that chunk of spectrum.
Besides, relatively few people even get television from an antenna anymore. Technological advances have always caused some to lag behind--why should TV be any different? I don't get why people just assume that it's in the public's interest for broadcasters to control massive quantities of spectrum when pretty much every engineer and economist has demonstrated that broadcasting analog television signals is a complete waste of spectrum.
I see why you might think that market didn't "demand" a conversion to digital broadcasting, that's only because the people who benefited from the analog era had no incentive to move on.
Command-and-control spectrum allocation is on the way out. Letting politically powerful lobbies like the National Association of Broadcasters dictate how the public airwaves are used is unacceptable. We need to figure out a way to use spectrum intelligently, and the DTV conversion is a good step in that direction.
The truth of DTV is that it's an excuse to force most of the population to cough up $500-$900 in a short period of time. It creates an artificial demand spike so that a select few corporations can profit from mass-exploitation. The fact that the vouchers are running out just confirms that people don't care about the Great New Wonderful High Definition Quality Orgasmic Display Technology Of Much Goodness BUY IT NOW. And why did it run out of money? Because they told the FCC that everyone wanted new TVs... I mean, who'd want to be saddled with last year's technology, right? Well, that would be us poor mother frackers who don't care to spend that much money for some passive display tech when we could just as easily go and buy a laptop and watch videos on THAT instead. And, big surprise, what's the major advertising point right now on a lot of laptops? Multimedia and a DVD drive. Go. Figure.
I hope television dies right here and now and consumers start downloading massive quantities of video online, choking the crap out of our ISPs and prompting a digital crisis as the commercial infrastructure of the internet burns. Those same corporate interests then will be scrambling to explain to congressional oversight committees why everything went to hell. And the beautiful part is that by strangling the internet, it'll force companies to compete for a limited resource -- they won't be able to ally themselves against consumer interest anymore.
The digital transition means less for television than it does for the future of the internet. Interesting, isn't it? Maybe they'll make a song about it -- "Internet Killed the TV Star?"
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
question
"Nobody owns the airwaves"
"As a society we decided to allow government to divy up the airwaves"
if nobody owns them then nobody has the right to decied on who gets to rule them.
last i checked no one owned Air it's self.. lets hope we don't decied to let the government divy it up.
my outrage is that a body of government that was put inplace to "regulate" has restorted to being basicly a distributer
orginaly they where in place to prevent people from just pumping more power in to over power others.. now it doesn't mater if you where there first or what your using it for.. if the guy next to you is willing to give the more $ they you will lose it. That is basicly what is happening here.. cause i assure you that if all the normal brodcast stations had gotten together to outbid for the c block that the FCC would have awarded it to them apon the check being cashed. and they could have kept right on brodcasting how they where...
now i also agree in progress in socity.. it makes sence to use them digitaly instead of analog.. BUT i also don't think that a the FCC has any biz being a fore profit intity.. if as you say as a socity we agreed to let them regulate it.. then as a socity they still belong to us.. so then why is this regulating body making money while forcing socity to spend money .. all so some company can use it for what ever they want with no benifit to socity other than another pay for x service?
sorry but if the government wants to build a road accross my land (has happened) they will pay me for it as they should. every penny spend on buying the spectrum should go driectly to the tax payers.. and as we all know that isn't going to happen ever.. the least they can do is pay for my grandmother who is on a fixed income to get a converter box.
once the cost of the convert box program meets or exceeds the money made by the FCC from the auction.. then we can argue aobut this.. but for now even being over budget it is still far less than what they are making.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
With a $40 government subsidy, the cost of converter boxes was guaranteed NOT to drop below $40. If you make the boxes, why leave that sweet government money on the table?
Now that the program money has dried up, maybe we'll actually see $10 or $20 boxes.
We may actually see converter boxes with more features as well. To qualify for the coupon, the boxes had to fall within a minimum/maximum spec set by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. If you made a box with too many features, then your box was not eligible for the coupon.
-ted