After the U.S. Senate approved a delay in the analog TV shutdown to June 12, and the House of Representatives narrowly rejected it, the House has now revisited its decision and this time has passed the measure. Link: NPR. Can't locate the story now, but think it was in Financial Times, that reported fewer than half of the coupons that the government has distributed have actually been used. --Dennis
The U.S. House of Representatives did not come up with enough votes (two-thirds required) to go along with the Senate's unanimous vote to delay the DTV transition to June 12 from February 17. Kim Hart has the story in the Washington Post.
Update 5 February 2009:
Oops, the House has now reversed course and passed the delay measure. Link: NPR. --Dennis
The local channel here in Washington, DC is reporting that the U.S. Senate has voted (with support from the Obama administration) to delay the implementation of the television analog shutdown from February 17 to June 12. It now goes to the House. I was on a conference call with several public television CEOs this afternoon, and a number of them reported they would keep their analog lit until June if this extension passes.
Update 27 January 2009:
Here's the AP story at NPR.org. --Dennis
Matthew Lasar has more on the proposed (by incoming Obama administration) delay in the February 17th shutoff of analog television broadcasting, asking if it's too late to turn back for logistical reasons. Links: Ars Technica plus another on Consumers Union also asking for the delay here. That may be the case.
The DTV transition has been in the works for a very long time, however until four months ago, no one predicted that it would coincide with a general financial crisis that has brought a number of broadcast advertising staples -- financials, automotive and retail -- to depression levels. It's also demonstrable that broadcast stations are more economically reliant on their over-the-air households than their cable and DBS households, magnifying whatever loss they will get in overall households by perhaps double in economic terms.
So, the coupon program is out of money. Congress should calculate whether it's cheaper to replenish that fund or wait for the television broadcasters to join the growing list of industries looking for a bail-out.
But it's not clear that consumers will be significantly more ready for digital several months hence with more coupons. These lines from Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" come to mind:
--Dennis
Jim Puzzanghera and Christi Parsons write:
Link: Los Angeles Times.
Update 9 January 2009:
Also see Kim Hart's article in the Washington Post.
Update 11 January 2009:
FCC's Kevin Martin says delay could cause confusion. Associated Press via NPR. --Dennis
The Ides of March come about a month early for television broadcasters next year when millions of over-the-air viewers -- many of them elderly -- must deal with receivers that, without converter boxes, become livingroom plant stands. Having just installed a new HD set in the livingroom and moved the analog set to an upstairs bedroom and installed one of the coupon converter boxes there for a technology-intimidated friend, I can testify that it's a challenging task. FOX's Talkshow with Spike Ferensten has a great send-up of the various television spots on the conversion that are now playing on stations across the country.
Do yourself a favor and watch this piece. But have a Kleenex handy. It will make you laugh big time, but when it's done, if you're a broadcaster, it might also make you cry. Link: MSN Video. Thanks to Karen Olstad for that link. --Dennis
I posted Sunday about the Wilmington, NC market switch from analog to digital TV transition, linking to a story on NPR by WHQR's Catherine Welch. Catherine had a follow-up story on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday. The link includes text and audio for the story plus additional information on the transition. Nice job covering this.
[By the way, if you're reading this fairly soon after this is posted, you'll see that NPR's open API already snagged this story and automatically posted it to the column of stories on the left of this blog. The stories are licensed for noncommercial use, so if you're site qualifies, check it out.]
Also see John Dunbar's story for the Associated Press, Old antennas cause complaints in digital TV test. Link: AP.
Big cable thinks it's going to gain subscribers, and they're probably right. See Deborah Yao's report, also for the AP, Comcast, Time Warner Cable sees digital TV gains. Link: AP. --Dennis
Since for the past six months I've a radio-only job for the
first time in my career, the FCC's transition to the new digital television transmission standard next February is suddenly a non-event, so I can say with Mad's Alfred E. Neuman, "What -- me worry?" The FCC and the broadcasters in the Wilmington, North Carolina market are trying to determine exactly how much to early tomorrow when the entire market cuts over to DTV early. Catherine Welch of Wilmington's public radio station, WHQR, had the story on NPR's All Things Considered today. It will be interesting to see what they learn.
--Dennis
The death of broadcasting is a popular theme in web posts. For example, Doc Searls asks, What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February? in Linux Journal (you should read it, but that's not my purpose here). Jeff Jarvis says in BuzzMachine they should Tear down the broadcast towers because Pandora is available on the iPhone. Those are the A-list bloggers, but it's popular with us Z to ZZZ-list bloggers as well. So I decided to do phrase searches to see how the media stacked up in the death department. Surprisingly, it wasn't old media:
Dead
"death of television", 13,000 results
"death of TV", 28,200 results
Deader
"death of radio", 227,000 results
"death of newspapers", 331,000 results
Deadest
"death of blogs", "death of the blogs", "death of the blog", 81,400 results
"death of the web", 215,000 results
"death of the net", 746,000 results
"death of the internet", 1,910,000 results
--Dennis
A week ago tonight I was in a Spokane, Washington hotel awaiting a morning one-way flight to Washington, DC. It had been exhausting and emotional week-plus organizing the move of my household goods and that day marked the last one I would spend in the house on a northern Idaho mountain ridge where I'd lived with my family for the past 21 years. My two youngest children are now grown and gone and my wife and her parents, who'd lived there with us, are deceased, so I was planning to sell the place even before this new job came up rather quickly at the end of February. What I'd thought might be a two or three month process turned into a two or three week process -- absolutely insane.
But my last day there also had some magic moments. When the atmosphere is absolutely pristine, I can see to the southeast some mountains on the other side of Elk City, Idaho, about 110-120 miles away. I've seen them only 3-4 times in the 21 years I lived there, but there they were at breakfast. And while bald eagles gather in great numbers, usually in January, on Lake Coeur d'Alene some 75 miles to the north-northeast, their appearance around my property is only slightly more common than the distant mountain view. Yet after lunch, there was one mature one circling my property. Wow!
Returning to the theme of this blog with a "department of personal experiences" report:
My March commuting to Washington is now over and I'm awaiting my car and household goods in a small 14th-floor apartment in the city. My new broadcast reception is so far all-digital. I sent an HDTV monitor and Samsung DTV decoder (5th-gen chip) on by UPS and purchased a Sangean HD Radio component tuner which I'm currently using with the HDTV monitor's RGB input. I have floor to ceiling door to the balcony and have tried the DTV tuner with two antennas -- a small Phillips model in a weather-proof wing-like enclosure that's meant to be mounted on an outside pole, and a Terk UHF log periodic with a built-in set of standard rabbit ears. The FM antenna is a standard twin-lead folded dipole laying on the floor in a sort of drooping T configuration. I don't know where the transmitters are located, but my antennas are looking toward the east.
The HD Radio performs quite well on the FM band. I can pick up several HDR stations, including WAMU and WETA-FM, the local NPR stations. The Phillips TV antenna worked well back in Idaho, but here it enables only a handful of channels to be accessed via scanning. The Terk does much better with the rabbit ears extended, though I've not found any configuration that permits me to pick up the Washington PBS stations, WETA and WHUT. I can, however, get a Maryland Public Television station as well as the "MHz" public station from Virginia (which is broadcasting five SD channels, all of which look pretty good).
The HD Radio experience is pretty seamless, thank goodness, but the repeated scan/adjust antenna/rescan/adjust antenna/rescan thing on the TV side is a real pain and I doubt many consumers will go through it. Who invented this turkey?!? Oh, it does look nice when it locks in on a channel.
Updated 7 April 2008:
Stephen Hill writes privately (highly paraphrased here), Get cable!. Yes, I'm going to do that as soon as my large screen shows up, and my unstated point is that so will most other over-the-air viewers. To traditional broadcasters -- and especially to public television stations -- these viewers will then become economically much less important (see many earlier posts on this topic). --Dennis
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