Slashdot Log In
DTV Coupon Program Out of Money
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jan 06, 2009 11:46 AM
from the time-to-nelson-laugh-at-the-government dept.
from the time-to-nelson-laugh-at-the-government dept.
Thelasko writes "It appears that the US Government's digital converter box program is running out of money. If you sign up after the program runs out of money, you will receive your voucher if the program receives more funding. Older analog televisions will no longer work without a converter box after February 17."
Related Stories
[+]
DTV Converters In Short Supply 192 comments
Ponca City, We Love You writes with a New York Times story saying there could be a shortage of DTV converter boxes in addition to the problem with coupons. "At the current rate of coupon redemption, 115,000 per day, plus sales without coupons, that means the current stock of converters could be sold out by the end of this month. So what would have happened if the whole digital transition worked the way it was supposed to? Many of those 3.7 million people would be marching into their local Radio Shack and Best Buy stores trying to buy converter boxes next weekend right before the scheduled cutoff on Feb. 17. And if the electronics association's numbers are right, the boxes would have sold out." Good thing the extended cut-off date was approved.
[+]
Digital TV Coupon Program Under Way Again 147 comments
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from CNet:
"Federal regulators said Thursday they are going into 'search and rescue' mode to help the millions of consumers unprepared for the phased transition to digital television, which culminates with the June 12 transition deadline. The millions of consumers waiting for coupons for digital converter box coupons will finally receive them within the next two and a half weeks, thanks to emergency funding for the coupon program provided in the stimulus package, said Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, an administrator for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The NTIA is also ratcheting up its outreach to consumers most likely to be unprepared for the transition... FCC commissioners said their agency is also intensifying its outreach, but they acknowledged that while one third of television stations have already dropped their analog signals, the hardest part is yet to come."
We previously discussed the DTV coupon program when it ran out of money in January. The $650 million from the stimulus packages adds to the $1.3 billion that's already been spent.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Remember.... (Score:3, Informative)
This summer's headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
20 billion auctioned off, 1.3 billion in coupons? (Score:4, Informative)
So the FCC made around 20 billion dollars auctioning off the spectrum [slashdot.org], but only allocated 1.3 billion for the coupon program? At $40 /coupon, that's around 32 million coupons. I'm guessing there's more non-cable televisions than that. Something seems quite a bit wrong with the amount allocated.
Voucher/coupon returns? (Score:3, Insightful)
So...is there a way I can *return* my voucher? I ordered one, thinking I was going to use it for my old tv, but then I went out and actually bought a nice new tv for which I don't need the converter box. I'm sure only a precious few people would actually bother to return the voucher once they discover they aren't going to use it, but it seems there ought to be a mechanism in place. I don't want to tie up this money indefinitely, even if it is just a drop in the bucket.
-G
Re:Voucher/coupon returns? (Score:4, Insightful)
The vouchers automatically expire after 90 days. I recall some doom and gloom about this program running out of money some time ago, based on the rate at which vouchers were being issued. Lots of people ordered them immediately, not realizing the expiration date, and discovered there wasn't much hardware you could spend them on yet. But since many of them weren't used that allocated money went back into the available pool again, just like your voucher will after it expires.
The main thing that's different now is that vouchers ordered recently won't expire before the DTV transition, so if the program runs out of money now there won't be a chance to recycle recently issued but unused vouchers until after the deadline.
Parent
Maybe kids will play outside, (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Perfectly good CRT TVs (Score:5, Insightful)
(Relevent report on that from 60 Minutes [cbsnews.com])
Digital TV: inferior in some ways (Score:5, Insightful)
The bad part about digital TV is the method of transmission they used is inferior in some ways to analog TV. It requires a very strong signal to get any video at all, and it's very suspectible to multipath interference. Analog TV would degrade gracefully, so that if you didn't get a strong signal you could at least hear it, and see black and white video. Digital TV is all-or-none. Also, portable TV antennas no longer work (at least, not while you're moving), so you can't stick one in your car or your Sony Watchman. Digital broadcast TV is a pain at this point...
Quinky dink (Score:4, Insightful)
Scammers Exploit DTV Coupon Program [slashdot.org]
Internet Killed the TV Star (Score:4, Insightful)
The truth of DTV is that it's an excuse to force most of the population to cough up $500-$900 in a short period of time. It creates an artificial demand spike so that a select few corporations can profit from mass-exploitation. The fact that the vouchers are running out just confirms that people don't care about the Great New Wonderful High Definition Quality Orgasmic Display Technology Of Much Goodness BUY IT NOW. And why did it run out of money? Because they told the FCC that everyone wanted new TVs... I mean, who'd want to be saddled with last year's technology, right? Well, that would be us poor mother frackers who don't care to spend that much money for some passive display tech when we could just as easily go and buy a laptop and watch videos on THAT instead. And, big surprise, what's the major advertising point right now on a lot of laptops? Multimedia and a DVD drive. Go. Figure.
I hope television dies right here and now and consumers start downloading massive quantities of video online, choking the crap out of our ISPs and prompting a digital crisis as the commercial infrastructure of the internet burns. Those same corporate interests then will be scrambling to explain to congressional oversight committees why everything went to hell. And the beautiful part is that by strangling the internet, it'll force companies to compete for a limited resource -- they won't be able to ally themselves against consumer interest anymore.
The digital transition means less for television than it does for the future of the internet. Interesting, isn't it? Maybe they'll make a song about it -- "Internet Killed the TV Star?"
Excellent! Converter box prices will drop! (Score:4, Insightful)
With a $40 government subsidy, the cost of converter boxes was guaranteed NOT to drop below $40. If you make the boxes, why leave that sweet government money on the table?
Now that the program money has dried up, maybe we'll actually see $10 or $20 boxes.
We may actually see converter boxes with more features as well. To qualify for the coupon, the boxes had to fall within a minimum/maximum spec set by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. If you made a box with too many features, then your box was not eligible for the coupon.
-ted
Re:yaay (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:yaay (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget the approx 20,000,000,000 commercials.
Not like it matters. The program will get whatever extra money it needs. No way will the feds deprive Joe Bob of his basic right to free programming. Panem et circenses for the 21st century.
Parent
Re:yaay (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:yaay (Score:5, Funny)
I'd love to compare the current U.S. to the faltering Roman empire but there's a football game on. Has anyone seen my welfare check?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No way will the feds deprive Joe Bob of his basic right to free programming.
I'm not really a big defender of pork in general, but I will defend this program. The government made a lot of money selling that bandwidth, and I don't really see why it end up coming out of the pockets of people with old TVs. That just would amount to a tax.
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it will work just fine...you just can't watch a digital signal without a converter. DVD's, VHS tapes, game consoles will all work just as before. The TV itself is fine...it's just YOU that's shit outta luck.
Collect some cans along the road and turn them in to buy your converter.
Parent
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:5, Funny)
Collect some cans along the road and turn them in to buy your converter.
I'd rather collect some TVs along the road and turn them into a sculpture of a triceratops.
Parent
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:4, Insightful)
question
"Nobody owns the airwaves"
"As a society we decided to allow government to divy up the airwaves"
if nobody owns them then nobody has the right to decied on who gets to rule them.
last i checked no one owned Air it's self.. lets hope we don't decied to let the government divy it up.
my outrage is that a body of government that was put inplace to "regulate" has restorted to being basicly a distributer
orginaly they where in place to prevent people from just pumping more power in to over power others.. now it doesn't mater if you where there first or what your using it for.. if the guy next to you is willing to give the more $ they you will lose it. That is basicly what is happening here.. cause i assure you that if all the normal brodcast stations had gotten together to outbid for the c block that the FCC would have awarded it to them apon the check being cashed. and they could have kept right on brodcasting how they where...
now i also agree in progress in socity.. it makes sence to use them digitaly instead of analog.. BUT i also don't think that a the FCC has any biz being a fore profit intity.. if as you say as a socity we agreed to let them regulate it.. then as a socity they still belong to us.. so then why is this regulating body making money while forcing socity to spend money .. all so some company can use it for what ever they want with no benifit to socity other than another pay for x service?
sorry but if the government wants to build a road accross my land (has happened) they will pay me for it as they should. every penny spend on buying the spectrum should go driectly to the tax payers.. and as we all know that isn't going to happen ever.. the least they can do is pay for my grandmother who is on a fixed income to get a converter box.
once the cost of the convert box program meets or exceeds the money made by the FCC from the auction.. then we can argue aobut this.. but for now even being over budget it is still far less than what they are making.
Parent
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
No it won't. Because of something the government did.
If the US government decided all of a sudden to change from driving on the right hand side to the left hand side of the road, don't you think people would be rightfully pissed about having to buy a new car, or get theirs converted?
(Look! A car analogy that works!!)
This is the entertainment equivalent of that. Everybody's old TVs that work fine are being obsoleted, not by the market, but by the government saying, essentially, "Your old TV is now illegal."
Certain things you can get away with doing that, if it doesn't affect a majority of people. You can restrict handgun calibers to 0.30 and lower, and most people will say "Well, what do those gun freaks need all those .38 and .44 guns for, anyway?" and the government gets away with it.
Try to do it with TV or cars, and the 90+ percent of the population that's affected will be rather annoyed, to say the least.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If the US government decided all of a sudden to change from driving on the right hand side to the left hand side of the road, don't you think people would be rightfully pissed about having to buy a new car, or get theirs converted?
(Look! A car analogy that works!!)
No, it doesn't. You don't need to convert your car (or add any converters to the car) in order to drive in the left lane, as evidenced by multi-lane one-way streets and passing lanes not requiring on-demand reconfiguration of the car.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No it won't. Because of something the government did.
Be happy. If pure market forces decided you'd have likely had to replace your TV's 4x as often.
If the US government decided all of a sudden to change from driving on the right hand side to the left hand side of the road, don't you think people would be rightfully pissed about having to buy a new car, or get theirs converted?
(Look! A car analogy that works!!)
I fail to see why changing which side of the road you drive on has anything to do with converting cars. The side that the steering wheel is one doesn't really matter (and plenty of people already drive cars with the steering wheel on the other side anyways - most postal carriers do as a matter of practicality, but people driving some imports do too).
This is the entertainment equivalent of that. Everybody's old TVs that work fine are being obsoleted, not by the market, but by the government saying, essentially, "Your old TV is now illegal."
"Illegal" is a stretch and you know it. They're not taking you
Market forces = backward compatible (Score:3, Informative)
I disagree 100%. Over the past 70 years, the NTSC standard has evolved from a mono sound, black & white picture to include color, stereo sound, second audio program and closed captions. These non-trivial changes were done without breaking backward compatibility with the original standard, not because of government protection, but because of market forces. No reasonable business wants to tick of a large inst
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:4, Funny)
2. Read newsletter
3. ????
4. Profit!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe not expensive to you (Score:4, Informative)
New TVs are not that expensive.
New TVs are expensive. If you're living on less than $800 a month, that $100+ is going to be felt. Trust me. This is obvious to anyone who hasn't had money supplied to them by their parents for their entire lives...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you're living off of 800 a month (net) you're total annual income is only about $11,000 which puts you well into the bottom 10% of incomes - and likewise makes it time to recognize a luxury good.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, because if one poor family spends money frivolously, that must mean they all do, right?
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
New TVs are not that expensive
WTF are you talking about? I paid a thousand dollars for mine! And not only that, throwing away a perfectly good TV is immorally wasteful, even if it's only a nineteen incher you paid a hundred bucks for.
The government is paying to fix a problem that THEY caused. You and your wife's $60k incomes togather may make a thousand bucks "chicken feed" but my forty grand and no wife can't afford to replace an otherwise perfectly good television.
Ask Gumby whose employer is being subsidized by the government by its giving Gumby a LINK card (making it possible to pay Gumby less; food stamps are a handout to the poor's employers) if he can easily afford that forty dollar converter box.
Its amazing how ignorant the upper middle class can be.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Walmart? No, thanks. I'd rather eat red-hot nails than shop at an establishment that's destroying America.
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:4, Interesting)
New TVs are not that expensive. Even pensioners could buy a new one. I don't think the government should be paying for any of this.
The Government, along with the major media conglomerates, would very much like to continue their effective propaganda campaign against US citizens. An easy way to do this is to is to continue providing lazy Americans with free TV in their house, ensuring that the message delivery system that is piped directly into homes stays intact.
It's quite brilliant, really. I am not a tinfoil hatter (don't even get me started on those "contrails kill!!" idiots) but I believe this.
Parent
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
New TVs are not that expensive. Even pensioners could buy a new one. I don't think the government should be paying for any of this.
It's very simple. Go back to the reasons for the "digital only" conversion. First, strike out the myth that it's to give HD. Digital HD. Second, remember that the market was not demanding digital TV.
So what's left? Two things. First, the government wanted to sell off the bandwidth that normal TV uses. Second, the *AA lobbies loved the idea of digital because they could put their "broadcast flag" in it and implement DRM.
Neither of these two reasons are in the public interest, and again, the market did not demand the conversion to digital TV. The Bush admin controlled FCC knew that they would have a lot of pissed off people if they forced people to buy new TV's so they came up with this converter box to pay for their hidden agendas.
Parent
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot one important justification for the DTV changeover: ending a massively wasteful use of spectrum.
A single analog TV channel uses a 6 Mhz of spectrum. And most channels sit vacant to avoid interference. Just four channels--24hz--is enough bandwidth to run a full-fledged mobile 3G network. You tell me what's a smarter way to use that chunk of spectrum.
Besides, relatively few people even get television from an antenna anymore. Technological advances have always caused some to lag behind--why should TV be any different? I don't get why people just assume that it's in the public's interest for broadcasters to control massive quantities of spectrum when pretty much every engineer and economist has demonstrated that broadcasting analog television signals is a complete waste of spectrum.
I see why you might think that market didn't "demand" a conversion to digital broadcasting, that's only because the people who benefited from the analog era had no incentive to move on.
Command-and-control spectrum allocation is on the way out. Letting politically powerful lobbies like the National Association of Broadcasters dictate how the public airwaves are used is unacceptable. We need to figure out a way to use spectrum intelligently, and the DTV conversion is a good step in that direction.
Parent
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:5, Interesting)
It probably has something to do with the massive amount of lead and various other environmentally hazardous material found in televisions: the gov't doesn't want it all in landfills. Especially, for that matter, right away: when TVs all stop working at once, everyone is going to dispose of their old ones immediately (not leave them laying around). Such a thing could overwhelm sanitation services (due to the weight of the things) temporarily.
Also, there are a LOT of people out there who don't like throwing things out. So there are still quite a few 30+ year old TVs out there with the analog 19 channel dials.
Parent
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, paying for another mode of reception doesn't insulate you from the DTV switch.
Parent
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:4, Informative)
This is where you're confused. The citizens of this country shouldn't have had to pay *ANYTHING* to buy a converter. The spectrum was sold for BILLIONS of DOLLARS to third parties and being that the citizens OWN the spectrum and the government does not, the money gained by this sale should have gone directly to us. I promise you that the $80 in coupons (which I didn't even get and they won't replace even though they didn't send it in any trackable manner) won't cover what we should have been given.
It's sad that people don't understand the simple fact that we got fucked on this deal all around.
Parent
Hidden Cost & Annoyances (Score:5, Interesting)
The converter boxes aren't that expensive, about as much as a new game, sure it sucks to be forced to buy new equipment but there are other things one can do besides watch TV if they are so unwilling to suffer the cost of the boxes.
This is true, my grandmother bought one for $30. Not too expensive. However, when I came home for Christmas, she asked me to hook the box up. She needed the TV to record soap operas on her VCR while she was at work. That is all she used it for (we're talking technologically inept middle of nowhere country folk here). Ok, so I run the coaxial cable into the back of the converter, then put the RCA cables into the input on the back of the VCR (which then turned into a coaxial cable to the back of her TV as her TV is 20 years old and that's all it has). Everything is working fine but as a side result, she can't program different channels because the converter box determines the channels. Ok, not a big deal to her.
... I tried a few other VCRs at my parent's house and they all seem to do it.
But then we record something and I notice a very peculiar thing with the color. I seem to recall that if you had put a DVD signal through a VCR, the color would modulate so that people couldn't dupe videos (or maybe there is a technical restriction). Anyway, she said she would put up with it but after watching 10 minutes of TV I wanted to throw the damned thing through the window.
So tell me, how do you record on these things to a VCR with no color modulation
Parent
Re:Hidden Cost & Annoyances (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.converters.tv/products/colour_correction_225.html
Parent
Re:Hidden Cost & Annoyances (Score:4, Insightful)
It does not sound like macrovision unless the VCR is from the mid '80s to early '90s (before everyone started using the same system for AGC). With macrovision you only see a color image about 5% of the time, then B&W for about 10% and then it is so dark you can hardly see a thing with the AGC scheme that has been in common use on VCRs for the last 15 years or so.
I simply think that the converter box or cables are of very poor quality. I've seen this happen with cable boxes in the past. Try shorter better RCA cables or plug the ANT OUT of the converter box into the ANT IN of the VCR and the ANT OUT of the VCR into the TV ANT IN.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Welcome to DRM.
I remember trying to copy some old VHS tapes that I'd picked up somewhere, so I didn't have to use/lose the original in a possibly abusive environment, and running across that problem. It was some encoding scheme by Macrovision that screwed up the recording circuits in a VCR, but wouldn't do anything to the playback circuits. There was a circuit diagram floating around somewhere at the time - you could probably still find it, maybe one of the links from here: http://forum.videohelp.com/topi [videohelp.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Depends on how "entitled" you are (Score:4, Insightful)
Because of this silly notion that "the people" own the airwaves...
Parent
Re:Depends on how "entitled" you are (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Depends on how "entitled" you are (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt very much that STNG's alternate universe is that accurate. Yes, if you have a holodeck, your holodeck is an interactive 3D TV. And note that Kirk's Enterprise had no holodeck.
Note also that Picard's crew staged plays. You don't think that the plays would be recorded, and that even more elaborate plays with special effects, professional actors, etc would be recorded (a TV show)?
Data's data were faulty.
Another thing - McCoy coudn't fix Kirk's age related presbyopia (farsightedness), but my surgeoun,