Well you may have heard rumor that television is going digital. The folks are saying it’s better technology and frees up airwaves for emergency transmissions among other things. The scheduled transition date was February 17 (which was set in 2005), after which the current analog signal was to be shut down and viewers who wanted to watch television (and isn’t that everyone!) need to be on board.
Everyone who currently has cable or satellite is already good to go, but if you’re still fighting the man on throwing down $ for your tv signal you might need to throw down a little $ for your tv equipment. New televisions come digital good to go (anything after March 2007 had to be digital), but if you have an old tv and aren’t ready to upgrade (though isn’t this is a good excuse to finally get a nice big flat screen?) you can get a digital converter box. These boxes hook into your tv and cost around $40-70. They do admit that the digital signal isn’t as strong and some users who were getting the analog (or getting it fuzzy) don’t get it or may need to upgrade their antenna to be in the clear.
Looks like apparently 6.5 million households have still yet to take the necessary steps to receive the digital signal once the plug is pulled on the analog one. These households are mostly low income, rural, and elderly folks and there is a program that offers coupons for $40 off certain models in certain locations. Unfortunately they’re out of coupons, sort of. The coupons each have an expiration date and they can’t issue new coupons until the already issued coupons expire if unused so they know they’re not going over budget. Currently there are over 3.5 million households on the wait list.
So the Obama administration encouraged congress to extend the date ’til June 12 and they somewhat reluctantly did so. Around 200 million has already been spent to make folks aware of the change so moving the date would have some implications on additional public service announcements as well as the costs to continue to output two signals. Some of the stations are dropping the analog early because of the dual signal costs, PBS estimates their costs at about 22 million alone. Fortunately it looks like the latest stimulus package includes a chunk of change to help out with the coupons at least, though that may not be approved for weeks.
Other helpful sites:
http://www.dtvtransition.org/
http://www.dtv.gov/
https://www.dtv2009.gov/
http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx
2 Comments
You are a very smart person!
I agree with you Rob!