Why was there such a rush to switch over in the first place?
Can’t they just say, “hey, in 2015 we will start requiring that all TV broadcasting be done digitally, so as of 2007 all new TVs much be capable of receiving digital transmissions”?
Worked with airbags, microwaves, and so on…
No. FM was barely past the experimental stage before the change was made. You didn’t have an FM radio in every house (hell, there probably wasn’t one in every town) immediately after WWII.
So those people who did have FM radios had relatively new ones, that I doubt were inexpensive items in the early to mid 40s, and the government, with a stroke of the pen and pressure from RCA to eliminate one man’s corporate interest in FM radio, made those radios obsolete.
They didn’t send out coupons for new radio, even though RCA had made a blatant play for securing control of the FM band and driving Major Edwin Armstrong out of business. It was their stated intent, after all.
As far as I know, the USA is the only place where the Government is handing out free (or heavily subsidised) Digital Set Top Boxes.
The way it’s being done here is fairly simple: Buy a Digital Set Top Box at your own expense, or get used to being a regular at Video Ezy. They keep having to change the Switch-Off Date because of a lack of interest in Digital TV, but eventually they’ll just pull the plug on analogue TV and tell anyone who doesn’t have a Set Top Box that they were quite entitled to make any objections at the appropriate time- provided they can obtain the relevant forms, which are (of course) stored in a stairless, lightless basement, in a locked filing cabinet located in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
My understanding is that’s how it’s working in the UK and NZ too- buy your own Digital Set Top Box or enjoy The Static Channel in all its monochromatic glory.
Funny how people here on the boards rant and rave against Universal Healthcare being some kind of Communist plot to undermine Democracy™, but are adamant that the US Government should be giving everyone free Digital TV Receivers… I say, Umpire, I do believe that Priority is out of Whack at this juncture!
So because the government fucked a couple hundred or a thousand people out of their FM radios in 194-whatever, that’s a good justification for fucking millions of people out of their televisions today? 
You’re kidding, right? What you are asking about is exactly what did happen (with different dates).
From here:
The legislation mandating the switchover was enacted in October 2005.
If you think I’m going to defend the FCC’s alleged corruption back there, you picked the wrong person. I was simply answering the question that you asked, which again, was:
Again, the answer is no. TV is about as ubiquitous as it gets these days. FM radio in the mid 40s? Not so much.
As an FYI, RCA didn’t want control of the FM band. In an ideal world, it would have gone away, as far as they were concerned.
Well, the recent extention of analog service may be for naught, if the stations here are typical of the country. They say they will kill their old transmitters on Feb. 17 anyway, citing the fact that they hadn’t budgeted for another four months of operation (transmitters are power hogs); given that ad revenues have doubtless plummeted in recent months, one can hardly blame them.
Also, what was it about airbags that required a switchover? They just mandated that they be added to new cars. How do you think this affected cars without air bags? Do you think that they were no longer drivable? I’m just not seeing how airbags are analogous to the digital TV switchover.
And microwaves?
Find a lot of overlap between these two groups, do you? I’m pretty certain that most of the people bitching loudest about this whole thing are the same people who think UHC is the devil.
We’ve already made the switch to digital it’s the analog signals they’re extending until June.
That said, I agree with the OP that the logic in continuing to broadcast in analog does not provide any incentive to those who haven’t upgraded yet. Turn it off and see how fast they line up for digital boxes.
What’s amazing to me is that I can now use my rabbit ears again when my dish goes down. 
It’s not being done for them. It costs the communications companies money - they have to buy new equipment, test it, run it in parallel with the existing analog stuff for a while, and so forth.
It is being done for everyone’s benefit - there are a limited number of frequencies available, and switching away from incredibly wasteful and inefficient analog TV transmission will free up lots of them for use by, among other things, public service agencies, wireless broadband, and emergency responders.
Sounds peanuts, doesn’t it? But if all you can afford to save a month is a few bucks towards new shoes for the kids, new coats, etc, it suddenly becomes a big deal.
Such poverty is hard to imagine for those who haven’t been there.
I wonder how many people who are pooh-poohing the expense of getting a digital box would feel if the FCC made the following announcement next year:
“Starting in 2012 all internet is going to be available only through special designated lines. You can only get these lines right now through specific modem boxes, which are more expensive than regular boxes, and you’ll have to pay your internet provider many extra dollars a month to get them. But don’t worry, in 2010 we’ll force all modem manufacturers to use these special boxes, which will of course raise the price of a new computer. And if you have an old modem in 2012 we’ll sell you a new modem box, and maybe have a coupon for it. Oh, but the speed will suck donkey dick. But don’t worry, if you don’t like that you can still shell out many dollars a month to your internet provider for a designated line.”
Then maybe they have bigger things to worry about than TV. It isn’t one of the four food groups, after all.
Well, the “different dates” are pretty important here. The operational life of a television is a lot more than 2 years. I say 2015 because by then 95% of the non-digital-capable TVs will no longer be operating.
They said, “hey, new cars need to have airbags”, and allowed the existing non-airbagged vehicles to slowly percolate out of operation. The whole point of my question is “why can’t the same be done with TVs?”
Re: microwaves- I dimly remember that some agency (the FCC?) restricted maximum wattage sometime in the 80s because of radiation or interference or some other such concern.
From a recent Reuters article:
Maybe AT&T and Verizon were buying those airwaves at a loss, not expecting to turn a profit off of their ownership of them. I kind of doubt it though.
Telecommunications companies make money off of wireless broadband and I sincerely doubt that any significant percentage of the airspace is going towards fire truck radios.
That said, I don’t give a rat’s ass about them switching over in general. I’ve got a big ole flatscreen TV with high def satellite. But I likewise can’t find myself upset that the government is actually being expected to help compensate those being affected and – sakes alive! – expected to do so correctly meaning no million-customer backlogs and all that jazz.
This cracked me up as it reminded me of the Simpson’s episode where the added a new area code …
Homer: What really burns me up is they didn’t give us one word of
warning.
Carl: What do you mean? They ran those TV commercials about it,
and that big radio campaign.
Lenny: Don’t forget the leaflets they dropped from the Space
Shuttle, and the two weeks we all spent at area code camp.
Homer: Not a single word of warning.
It’s a change in the date of the mandatory analog broadcasting shut off. It does not require stations to broadcast in analog until a certain date. Some stations will be dropping analog broadcasts regardless of the available extension to allow broadcasting longer.
Some TV stations to end analog broadcasts in Feb. despite congressional delay
Last summer, people didn’t rush to order coupons because the coupons had a short expiration date–90 days, which meant that the box would sit and gather dust for 3+ months.
So they waited until December and the coupon system crashed.
Perhaps the government should have skipped coupons and simply allowed a $40 credit for boxes purchased any time in 2007-2010. And they should have included a “buy American” clause to encourage the electronics industry to make the boxes here, not the Peoples’ Republic of Poison and Garbage.