In very large quantities, yes. That doesn’t mean that they are easy or cheap to design. Plus, the subject is covered by a huge number of patents that need to be licensed. The up-front costs of designing and manufacturing a complex chip set are insane.
And all I’m saying is if it comes down to saving jobs or ensuring every boob has a tube to stare at I’ll choose jobs. And that’s exactly what Congress should do. There will always be stupid people and no amount of legislation will fix that.
I’ve listened to over a year of announcements about the need to buy a converter. All people had to do was call or email the government to get a $40 coupon that was good for a $50 converter. If someone ordered 2 of the coupons they could have sold one for $10 and the cost of the transition would be zero. It’s no different than any other government give-away that requires the most minimal of effort.
What part of “there are thousands of people on the waiting list who asked for their coupons and won’t get them by mid-February” do you not understand?
–Cliffy
If I had been in charge, everyone would have received two boxes with their income tax refund. 
What part of a year to get it done did you not understand? How many social give-aways are you aware of that give a year to apply for? We’re expected to file our taxes by April 15th. That’s the date. If a thousand people or a million people can’t handle that then the solution isn’t to continue to roll back the date. If a year doesn’t cover it then no amount of time will. There will ALWAYS be someone who doesn’t apply for the coupons.
I can’t believe we’ve reached the point of government dependence that some people expect to be spoon fed a free converter in order to continue using a luxury item. What a human tragedy compared to getting laid off because the government backed out of a negotiated date or the loss of retirement income from a 401K investment.
Update from my area. Channel 7 has already said it is making the switch on Feb 17th. It involves changing out the analog antenna and it is not something that can be reasonably rescheduled. The companies doing the work are on a set time table with other stations.
Passed. Why did it only require 50% this time? Can someone explain this to me?
The way it originally was voted into law required a 2/3 majority. Then it went to an open vote where amendments could be added to bog it down. Then it went to a closed vote that prevented any stalling techniques. I’m guessing they wanted to get it off their plate so they could work on saving the 500 million jobs lost every month.
Let’s remember that many of the people needing converter boxes are not lazy welfare queens watching Days of our Lives, but the elderly. For many elderly people- especially those without families that visit them- TV really is their life and they don’t have much more that gets them through the day.
As I understand the new bill, while it extends the hard cut to June, it doesn’t require that stations keep their analog broadcasts in place–anytime before the June date they can cut them off, they just have to be off the analog stations by the June date.
Which just seems like it may muddle the issue more.
And it doesn’t add more money for the coupon program, so the 3.5 million or so reported as being on the waiting list just have to hope that there are more than that number of coupons out there that expire before they are used. Oh, and it lets people who let their coupons expire re-apply for one.
So how many years do you allocate for the conversion process? What makes June 12th a hard date? Seriously, take a shot at the question. What does it take to make a hypothetical elderly population pick up the phone and order a coupon and why will it occur over the next 4 months versus the last 12?
What about cities like Seattle who are making the switch Feb 17? How much more confusing can this get? Half the stations in my area are switching over.
Stations have until Sunday Feb 8th to alert the FCC if they intend to stop broadcasting on analog Feb 17th. I’m already seeing the mandated PSA’s required to make the change.
It’s not so much that people haven’t applied for coupons, it’s that they don’t have enough money for the coupons, and people have been waiting weeks/months for coupons and still have not received them. This is in no way their fault. It’s a problem caused by the government, and the government should fix it.
I can see that happening. I don’t know the exact financials of the stations involved, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they suck it up and keep going until June, unless the costs are that overwhelming, or existing scheduling (as in the above example) is set in stone.
If you’re an ABC station in an area with CBS, NBC, and FOX broadcasting, you really don’t want to be the only one to switch early. Assuming we have about the same number of non-converted households in June as we do now (and I’m thinking we’ll have close to it), that’s a lot of potential loss of viewers to competitors. At least if the February date hadn’t been extended, all of those stations would lose those viewers – until they bought the converter boxes.
I understand that and you can make the case that the procrastinators got the short end of the stick. But the 6.5 million number isn’t an all inclusive indicator of people who would be financially inconvenienced by their late application for a coupon. As it stands, a substantial number of stations will make the switch on the original schedule. It won’t just be a one for one trade of digital for analog. Many of these stations are splitting up their signal into multiple channels.
Ran across an article yesterday with some further information on stations switching or not switching, including at least some estimated costs
http:///tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090205/ap_on_hi_te/tec_digital_tv_transition
I don’t know much about it, and didn’t really know anything about the switch until this thread. But I have been getting some strong whiffs of “If you are poor and not with it you deserve what you get” and “poor people shouldn’t be watching TV anyway.” I thought it’d be useful remind people that the mental image is probably more “neglected grandparent hoping to hear a human voice for once who doesn’t really get what all this digital business means” than “bon-bon eating welfare queen watching her friends on Jerry Springer who can’t be bothered to check the mail.”
I have no idea where you’re getting this bon-bon eating welfare/neglected grandparent stuff but it is an emotional appeal that doesn’t stack up to the numbers.
A great deal of time and money was invested in Feb 17th. Provisions were made for people of limited funds to ease into the transition and a great deal of time was provided to make the change. We’re down to 2% of the population who still want a free converter and not all of that percentage is without the funds to purchase the item. For those people who are not destitute they can purchase a unit at any time. The cost of procrastination is $50. They may now wait for the coupon or go without seeing the stations that are committed to the Feb 17 date.
This is not the time to play games with the economy. Waiting 2 weeks before a hard date that was established years ago is commercial suicide. It affects thousands of contracts dealing with physical antenna modifications, scheduling, sales, advertising and everything else that goes into operating a station. It involves stations swapping bandwidth back and forth (between UHF and VHF) that was established after years of negotiations. Qualcomm was set up to begin offering a new product, which is now delayed 4 months. That is a tremendous amount of money Congress has pissed away because 2% of the population didn’t receive a coupon they may or may not have needed.
How is that so? The stations here are transmitting in analog and digital.
Stations who are transmitting on both (which is pretty much all of them) have to maintain both systems. They’ve deliberately not put the money into maintaining the analog transmitting equipment because it’s expensive (power tubes etc…). They’ve already scheduled the antenna swaps because of the juggling of frequencies and it’s not something that you pick up the phone and cancel. In my area, there are a number of station who are dividing up their channel. All the programming and sales planning is now jeopardized by a 4 month delay.