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February 7, 2009 With so many people subscribing to cable and dish, you'd think the death of Analog Television wouldn't be such a big deal. With roughly 50% of America on cable and 30% on dish, only 20% of the nation would really be affected. Then it's just a matter of getting the converter box, right? Well, ask the government about how that's going. My parents bought me an antenna for Christmas because I was planning on dumping my satellite dish. I wasn't watching as much TV as I used to and couldn't really justify paying $50 a month for something I wasn't using. So I figured I could get local network TV for free. Wow! Imagine that! A generation is now arising that has never had antenna TV. I never had cable until I moved out of my parents' place. Then, years later, they got a satellite dish after I got one. My mother recently asked how my over-the-air TV reception was. My response was as follows: I actually found myself watching C-SPAN on Wednesday to see what the House of Representatives was going to do with the DTV delay bill. It passed. Stupid congress. I was so excited when they shot it down the week before. Fred Upton (MY MAN!) was one of those who spoke out against it, but it still passed. Obama was signing some bill across town and everybody was in a hurry to get this voting over with and head on down there for the press conference. It was rushed and poorly thought out, and as a result, in the eyes of the government, the remaining five to six million people without a converter box or cable or satellite dish have until June 12th to get a converter box with their coupons or hook up with a provider. This didn't solve anything. The government is still out of money with this program and the expired coupons are still expired. They've had years to take care of this and four more months won't do them any good. And it's not like stores are out of converter boxes. You can go buy one for $50 or $60. It's the government who's failed with the $40 coupons, setting a price floor on the equipment. Prices have already fallen and who knows how cheap they'd be today if the government hadn't "helped us out". Now, the real issue that congress doesn't understand is that TV stations now have until June 12th to drop their analog transmission and begin (or, in most cases, continue) to air their digital transmission. As of February 17th, all stations would have ceased analog transmission. Now, stations have the option of ceasing analog transmission and going with only digital, but they have until June 12 to do it. They have to decide whether to maintain and pay for one signal or two for four additional months. We've been broadcasting both signals for two years now. As of February 17th, we were supposed to hand over our frequency in the analog spectrum to emergency responders for better communication among fire and police departments. It would also open up frequencies for next generation consumer wireless networking. That's why we're doing this in the first place. To better organize the airwaves and improve communication. Some stations are moving around in the digital frequency spectrum too. Channel 3 can't move because the place it's moving TO is currently being used by Channel 8. Channel 8 would be moving down one notch in the spectrum to a frequency that no one is currently using. We can't move until they move. Now we're stuck paying to transmit our analog signal until they move. What if someone was moving to our current spot? Then they'd have to wait too. This is absolutely stupid. Four years ago, congress set the date. Everybody knows the date. Let's add some more confusion to this process, defeating the purpose of passing the bill. Those in favor said people were confused about it so they haven't acted. It's not hard. People are lazy. The day they see static on their TV is the day they'll be motivated to go buy a converter box. Even if they're "poor" or "old" (another point made on the side of the bill), if TV is what's important to them, they'll find the money and someone to hook it up. All you asked was if I was still getting good TV reception. Sorry. We won't get rid of the dish until after this DTV conversion is made, so we'll know how well we'll pick up each station after the music stops and everybody sits. But so far, it looks good. I just have to go outside and swap some wires before we can watch CW. I want a job at the FCC. |