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Senate Passes Another Bill To Delay Digital TV Transition
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.
There will always be millions of people who will have problems with the switchover. Most are poor and / or elderly. No amount of delay and / or money thrown at the problem will fix it. Just flip the damn switch already and deal with the small percentage of folks negatively affected. Seriously, this has been in the works for years -- if you don't know about it by now, you won't until your picture turns to a bunch of static.
This from the party of "Green" everything? Here's the REAL story...a buddy of mine (who's dad is the chief engineer at an Amarillo, Texas TV station) tells me that it costs about $10,000 per month in electricity to run a transmitter. That's ONE transmitter - for either analog or digital. When you add a second transmitter, you double the juice, and double the cost. Same data. Same shows. Same commercials - just costs twice as much to air it. Now figure that there are over 300 local TV stations in the US. Delay the transition until June, and you're talking over $12,000,000 in wasted money (that the stations can't bill anybody for) and wasted electricity. How many friggin' mercury-filled florescent lightbulbs and carbon offsets will it take to make up for that kind of waste, hmm? While we're on the subject, how many people in the US don't have either cable or satellite TV? Seriously...I've asked as many low-income people I know or run into, and I've yet to find ANYbody that gets their TV through rabbit ears or a roof antenna. Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy the handful of Luddites new TVs and be done with it?
Captain Digital Fighting for truth, justice, and graphic design.
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...
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
Well I think the US chose the wrong time to switch. We should have done the switch Saturday Jan 31st. Then half the country would have missed the Superbowl and maybe that would be the catalyst for change in DC. I swear that could work.....
All points of time and space are connected.