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Digital TV Coupon Program Under Way Again
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from CNet:
"Federal regulators said Thursday they are going into 'search and rescue' mode to help the millions of consumers unprepared for the phased transition to digital television, which culminates with the June 12 transition deadline. The millions of consumers waiting for coupons for digital converter box coupons will finally receive them within the next two and a half weeks, thanks to emergency funding for the coupon program provided in the stimulus package, said Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, an administrator for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The NTIA is also ratcheting up its outreach to consumers most likely to be unprepared for the transition... FCC commissioners said their agency is also intensifying its outreach, but they acknowledged that while one third of television stations have already dropped their analog signals, the hardest part is yet to come."
We previously discussed the DTV coupon program when it ran out of money in January. The $650 million from the stimulus packages adds to the $1.3 billion that's already been spent.
Spend more money to make more money, right?
So what happens with people that ended up paying full price for a converter because the coupons stopped flowing and 1/3 of the transition (which in many places was nearly a full transition) already happened? Can they just get $40 back with the coupon and their original paid-full-price receipt? Even if they got their full price converter at Circuit City?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That $1.3 billion is the amount that has been allocated to be spent. Last I read, less than half of that had actually been spent and the rest was tied up in coupons that had been requested but had neither been used, nor expired yet.
The program allows 2 coupons per household, at $40 each. This is a max of $80 per household.
The total program funding is given at $2 billion. This means, at a minimum, 25 million American households still receive OTA TV signals. Given that not everyone who's eligible will apply, and not every household has multiple TV's, a more realistic figure might be somewhere around 30 million households.
There are a little over 110 million US households in the US per the US census bureau.
Assuming the program is properly funded, this means that between 25-30% of US households still use OTA TV.
Something's not right here. I seem to recall the numbers for "how many people will be affected?" by the DTV transition were considerably lower. Either this program is dramatically over funded, or a huge percentage of participants don't actually need the boxes, or digital TV penetration is considerably lower than was advertised when the transition was debated...
we have not heard stories of mass outages of TV for the unprepared
And nothing of value was lost.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just as an anecdotal data point, I requested coupons the day after the last /. article about their running out. I got them in the mail last week. I'm guessing you were asking rhetorically, but just in case; folks who couldn't wait are boned.
"Millions" of unprepared consumers? Seriously, the commercials warning about the transition have been playing several times an hour every day for the past 6 months or more (I was even getting them on Satellite TV, which is immune to the change) It's literally been impossible to avoid hearing about this.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
This is it folks, this may be the last real chance we have at identifying the portion of the country that's incapable of intelligence! They don't need search and rescue, they need search and destroy!!!!
Send taxpayer money to Chinese manufacturers of converter boxes; to accommodate the bandwidth auctions to major US telecom companies: who intend to soak customers to get their money back?
Am I missing something???
So, let's just get the effing show on the effing road, dudes,... I bought my DTV converter, with coupons, over a year ago, and still get a crappy signal because 5% of the numb-nuts put it off until the last minute,... So all the DTV stations around here only broadcast signals at 25% power. So hurry the frak up so the rest of us get a decent DTV signal!
About 3 weeks ago, power was lost due to a storm. On the 2nd day of no power, I ran an extension cable from the TV to the my big UPS that still had energy remaining because I shut down the computers soon after the power went out (knowing it would be a while before it came back on). Nothing was coming through via Comcast. That could be because their lines were damaged in the storm, or their equipment was without power. I could get TV over the air from 2 stations, one in analog (which isn't anymore), and one in digital (because I could power my digital tuner from the UPS). People who have cable and no fallback means to receive TV in the event of a storm or accident that takes out the cable wiring or equipment is ... unprepared.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What happens to all those who applied for coupons in the early stage of the program -only to be told by local retailers that there was no stock available- and their coupons expired?
Sig this!
From the summary, "The millions of consumers waiting for coupons for digital converter box coupons will finally receive..." Coupons to get coupons? How long before those run out and we need coupons for coupon coupons? (ad infinitum? Also kind of sad that this typo reflects the actual state of things!!)
Evolution - Est. 4500000000 B.C. Don't piss in the gene pool.
Whom is the target of this program? Supposedly it is consumers unprepared for the transition, that being those not yet digitally equipped. Why aren't they yet? Given the addictive nature of television, I can't think of a reason other than that they are not addicted. If television addicts are already eqipped for digital TV, and everyone else just doesn't care, who will benefit from the program? Because it doesn't exist for consumers, but for the fear that less consumers may watch TV, it will help neither the consumers nor those with the fear. It'll only help whomever ends up with the money.
I have to say I am surprised at the result. Even 60 miles from the transmitters with a modest antenna that gave me a very snowy signal on analog, I have twice as many channels and they are razor sharp. There have been a few transient artifacts but not the hopeless pile of random polygons I feared because of my marginal signal strength. I was very afraid the damn thing wouldn't work at all out here and I'd be stuck for the difference between the true cost and the coupon.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
So, can someone explain what the DTV coupon program's funding has to do with stimulating the economy?
If there hadn't been so many trailer-trash penny-ante entrepreneurs requesting the coupons and then buying converters with no intention of using them but rather re-selling them on eBay and the like, there would have been plenty of funding to get the converters into the hands of the people who arguably need them. The trailer-trash entrepreneurs were quite probably the early adopters in the program, and the government had no way to guarantee that the converters being purchased with coupons were actually being used by the same people.
That's what happens when you let capitalist foxes into the socialist henhouse, so to speak.
I am SO glad that our leaders are dealing with the important issues. I mean, it's not like we have a shitty economy or horrible foreign relations to worry about lately.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Well I'm a crazy [insert whatever] who wants to know why the hell we're giving handouts for TV for anybody! Nobody will die without American Idol.
It's not a handout. It's a (partial) reimbursement from the government to the previous users of the bandwidth for seizing the bandwidth and selling it for billions, which went into the treasury.
The analog television system worked just fine for what it did. A LOT of people bought equipment in the good faith expectation that it would continue to be usable for the equipment's life.
Then the government decided that, if it forced the TV stations to switch over to digital, they could provide a replacement service that would be better than the existing system (which wastes lots of bandwidth to reduce analog interference), it could re-sieze a lot of that bandwidth and auction it off to other users.
- The existing broadcasters get replacement bandwidth and can get more use out of it by multiplexing other services into it - which helps them pay for the new equipment.
- More use gets made of the total bandwidth, thanks to the new services enabled in the auctioned spectrum. So the buyers and their customers are enabled.
- But the old viewers are hosed. They have to upgrade perfectly good equipment or buy a converter to continue getting the level of service they already bought into. There are a LOT of them, and many of them don't have a lot of spare money to throw at the extra expense.
So the government is spending PART of the money it got from the auction of the spectrum to pay PART of the cost of the converter boxes for the viewers.
It's like paying (but less than market rate) for land seized by eminent domain.
The origin of property rights is making use of and improvements on previously unowned property in the expectation that you can then continue to do so. By that definition, the broadcasters and the viewers had a property right in the spectrum previously used for analog broadcast TV from which they've been evicted by the government for its own profit. So it's reasonable for them to expect payment for their loss and trouble.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"thanks to emergency funding"
Are these people serious? Emergency funding? This isn't that big of a deal. Oh well, a few noobs could be without tv for a week or so.
LIBERTARIANS:
LISTEN CAREFULLY: The government made a NET GAIN on this transition.
They sold the spectrum reclaimed from analogue broadcasts for much more than this coupon program costs. It's not donating taxpayer money for TVs, it's compensating people for re-selling THEIR assets (radio spectrum) to private companies, something the government should be doing more often IMHO. And before anyone jumps up and down about how "people should be allowed to broadcast on any channel they choose", realise that no radio communication would work if that were the case - everyone would broadcast over everyone else, no-one would receive the signal they want, and it would be anarchy. There needs to be some authorisation for maintaining radio signals, and as bad as they are, the government are the only ones capable and willing (private enterprises don't have authority over one another, and no market force compels them to maintain the spectrum in the interests of the people).
Libertarians with mod points, moderate this post to oblivion if you want.
TV Tunning? That its so last century!!
I ordered mine right after the story about the lack of coupons showed up. I got my coupons a few weeks later. Went and used them last week at Circuit City. Most everything in the store was gone except around 100 Guitar Hero games and 2 pallets full of DTV converter boxes. With the going out of business prices, the cost of each converter box was less than $40!
This amount of money could have been used to buy everyone a new HDTV who watched tv over the air... Most people have cable, or satellite.
This is absolutely absurd to spend this kind of money on something that people should be figuring out on their own.
I live in in Florida. After Wilma hit in 2005 I was without cable for 3 weeks. For this reason, I got a free converter box with free shipping from freetvsignal.com. I am going to keep it with the rest of my hurricane supplies.
Can they put some of that money into ensuring that the stations broadcast with a usable amount of power? Most of the stations seem to put out enough power for decent reception only in their immediate vicinity - places that are far enough away that the analog signal is only slightly fuzzy (but still entirely watchable) get nothing thanks to the all-or-nothing nature of digital.
[TMB]
There is no oversight whatsoever to the whole process. They claim my coupon was mailed on 12/29/08; it never made it to my mailbox. After a few weeks I contacted the program's customer support, and I am basically SOL. There is no way they will reissue coupons if they get lost in the mail, nor are you allowed to reapply. There is no way to appeal this decision. There are internet forums full of people saying that their coupons supposedly mailed between november and december never arrived, and got the same reply I did when complaining. I suspect something wrong went on during those months, and they just won't admit it. Again, there is no recourse.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Get it right.
Socialists don't raise hens but will gladly share in yours.
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