True to expectation the Senate has whisked through the proposal from the Obama camp to delay analog TV switchoff in the US until June 12, instead of by February 17th. Now the Senate has passed it, Congress will have the final vote to pass it into law sometime next week.
Spookily, after years of preparation and agreeing and spending 1.34 billion subsidizing digital set top converters, there are still supposed to be 6.5 million homes who’s TVs are about to go dark. Someone can’t do math. Our own vote would be to let them go dark. In some cases it’s what they want anyway and it is not the end of the world to go without TV for a few days or weeks or months or long enough to walk to the TV store and buy a $40 converter box.
This has taken on some of the ‘millennium bug’ prominence. Remember as New Year’s Eve 1999 approached all the planes came out of the sky, no trains were allowed to run, people spent $billions fixing 30 years old banking programs, and come the day not a thing went wrong.
It will give President Obama a chance to push more money at the American people which will make him popular, and give the cable and DTH and IPTV players more time to panic customers into converting not only to digital, but to a pay TV environment. It’s not as if the $40 coupons will actually help. First some of the devices don’t work, or work poorly, then some parts of the country will require antenna boosters, which cost twice as much, and finally new rooftop antennas may have to be fitted by professionals, with a cost of around $400 for the equipment and labor, if other digitization programs are to be believed.
The very fact that people are still sitting on unredeemed coupons about to expire tells you that people are not sure what to do with them. Perhaps it’s a case of not doing anything until the TV actually stops showing programs. Apparently the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is sitting on 2.6 million coupon requests which it cannot fulfill, in case unexpired, but unused coupons are suddenly presented.
It will be a savage blow to a new government if at the end of this rethink, and after allocating and spending another $1 billion, there are still millions of homes which fail to make the switch and then complain about it. But it is likely that the estimate of 6.5 million homes is too large by an order of magnitude.