Sorry right back at you, no, it isn’t. I know it’s long been fashionable on the SDMB to play the “teh evil rich want to hurt teh poor” card, but I won’t play that game.
Don’t misrepresent my argument. My argument is, in very clear words, what is the inclusion rate needed to implement a national policy on broadcast spectrum use. Your answer seems to be…well, you don’t really address my substantive question.
Some people will get left out, and for them it sucks. But that’s the case with with every government program, every policy decision, even every single thing in life. I ask yet again, where is the cutoff point? What is the magic inclusion number? And whatever number you pick (other than the impossible 100%), tell me how you will address, exactly, the complaints which will come rolling in about your cutoff point.
And people have known about this for much, much longer than a year.
So dividing the the country into either rich or poor, which group to you think the most “left outs” will occupy.
Yep, so did the manufacturers. Yet less than two years ago, sitting on the shelves of the big box stores were “analog-only” SD TVs. Guess which TV’s in the store were the cheapest. And guess which group bought those TVs.
I’ve never had a TV that wasn’t used for at least five years so I’m thinking that this adjustment to new technology hasn’t been very well planned and implemented.
I’m all for the new technology. Every TV in my house is equipped for ATSC and my nice fat antenna on my house picks up those digital signals just fine. But I’m in close to a major market broadcast area. If I lived 20 miles farther out from the city my digital reception would be severely limited barring a big investment in a tower antennae. A lot of deep suburb and rural homes are going to have to do a lot more than pay for a converter box. They’re going to need to put big money into a new antennae.
And why? To shift the bandwidth from one consumer use to another.
Look at it cynically. Take the bread and/or circuses from the people and you have a riot on your hands. That’s something any politician is going to pause and look at.
Horse feathers. The government has no obligation to maintain backward compatibility or to compensate people who own equipment that has been made obsolete. Remember FM radio, the first version, promoted by Edwin Armstrong? I used to own a 220 MHz FM two-way radio. Then a bunch of jerks at UPS convinced the FCC to take the band away from the Amateur Radio Service and give it to UPS. The bastards at UPS never used their new band. A huge amount of two-way radio equipment was made obsolete by new FCC rules in the 1960s. The owners of those radios never got a dime in compensation.
I’ve looked through the FCC coverage maps for analog and digital TV. The coverage areas are almost identical. The FCC has computer models that take into account antenna height, location, transmitter power, frequency, etc. See http://www.fcc.gov/dtv/markets/
I’m not affected by this at all, (love my DirecTV) But, I imagine that whoever is waiting for all this new bandwidth is not even ready to start using it. A few month delay won’t cause them any difficulty I venture (without cite or even a good understanding of who “they” are)
Maybe, but it’s bad politics to tell people, “Hey, remember TV, which you’re used to getting for free? Well, if you’ve got an old TV, we’re going to make you pay $40 for a box so you can keep getting it.”
Like I mentioned before, two years ago TVs with “analog-only” receivers were sitting on store shelves.
If I may modify your quote -
“Hey, remember TV, which you’re used to getting for free? Well, that TV you bought two years ago that gets a great picture with those rabbit ears - we’re going to make you pay $40 for a box and $200 for an outdoor antennae so you can keep getting it.”
Don’t kill yourself trying to install the antennae in February.
That’s the way it works. It sucks for some people, we’ve acknowledged that. But by and large, most people in the contrary don’t seem to be up in arms about it–nor will they even notice a difference on February 17.
There’s a link upthread to the FCC site, with details on nationwide and local coverage for all markets. In mine, coverage area appears to increase for all affected stations. YMMV, obviously.
OMG, you’re ABSOLUTELY RIGHT! Obama’s mention of this TV thing COMPLETELY negates all the positive reasons to vote for him! We’re all doomed! By god, I was in agreement with Obama on virtually every important issue but I wish McCain was in office right now. We’re almost surely correct in speculating that he NEVER would have wasted a nanosecond thinking about the TV thing.
There are some important issues that have been overlooked here.
The coupons have been a bit of a fiasco. I never received mine, and was told they would not be reissued. As such, I had to have a family member (who has cable) to order them for herself so I could get one to actually use. If they expire or you don’t receive them, you’re SOL.
The coupon program has run out of money so people who do actually want to make the switch and can pay the premium on top of the coupon are SOL unless they want to eat the cost of the coupon themselves, when other taxpayers didn’t have to.
Television service is not just entertainment. Broadcast television is important for emergency situations. Here in the Midwest, having television service is practically a necessity during tornado season; the sirens only go off if a tornado is spotted, but don’t tell you where the tornado is, or when it’s safe to come out. For access to tornado watches and other weather information, you need radio, TV, or Internet. Radio is increasingly uncommonly used outside of vehicles and cannot stream the information constantly as the internet (which many people still do not have) and TV (through constantly streaming weather information across the bottom of the page, which happens here during any severe weather in the state). Given that people who are in poor housing are disproportionately affected by tornados’ danger - think houses without basements, trailers - this is a real concern.
We are in the middle of a huge economic crisis. Many people should not, even if they could go without, be paying for converter boxes and possibly new antennas. A six month delay could allow us to, potentially, get out of the crisis and if not, at least solve problems 1) and 2) above if we take the time to fix the coupon program.
I quite agree. Concerned Americans should demand that their President and his entire staff address only one problem at a time and no more. That is how things get done. This unwarranted and reckless multi-tasking will not stand!
The problem is that curretnly they are jamming analog and digital signals into the same spectrum. Until analog is gone they cannot optimize the signal.