DTV Coupon Program Out of Money 591
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."
Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:4, Insightful)
This summer's headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Depends on how "entitled" you are (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Depends on how "entitled" you are (Score:2, Insightful)
Tell that to someone living on $500 a month.
If you really *are* living on $500 a month and TV is your biggest concern, then you have a priority problem.
Re:Depends on how "entitled" you are (Score:4, Insightful)
Because of this silly notion that "the people" own the airwaves...
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.
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.
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: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.
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.
Re:yaay (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.
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...
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.
Re:Depends on how "entitled" you are (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (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: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.
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe kids will play outside, (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (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 your TV or doing anything to it. It's just that it won't receive over the air signals after that date. Tough luck. Keep using it how it is or buy a new one.
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.
Do you live in Australia? Because that's the only place I know of with a restriction on handgun calibers like that. Anyways I fail to see the connection at all. The government is banning nothing here. You can still keep your old TV just fine. To carry your gun analogy a little farther: amongst my collection of rifles I have a Winchester 670. It's chambered in the somewhat rare .225 Winchester round. It fell out of popular favor back in the 60's to the fairly similar .22-250 Remington round. Winchester makes very little ammo to fit my gun anymore and is quite likely to cease production completely at any time. At that point except for hand produced ammunition that gun will be useless. Should the government buy me another gun instead? Or should they replace all the HD-DVD players that people bought? Of course not. Thing become obsolete over time. It's the nature of a device.
Re:Maybe not expensive to you (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, because if one poor family spends money frivolously, that must mean they all do, right?
Re:Depends on how "entitled" you are (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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?"
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody owns the airwaves though, so you're not entitled to anything. As a society we decided to allow government to divy up the airwaves. You can use portions yourself you know, provided you follow the rules. CB radio, ham radio, 800mhz and 1.4ghz are all mostly unregulated.
I really could care less if you don't want to spend to money to buy a converter; it's not a right to watch TV anyway. Of course, converters would likely be much cheaper if this stupid program has never gotten through, but don't let that stop your outrage.
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Excellent point. The FCC took-away the People's channels 52 to 69, and sold those channels for several billion. The least the FCC could do is share some of that wealth with the poor & elderly to help them upgrade their analog sets for DTV reception.
Hence Congress passed a law requiring exactly that.
Re:Why is the government even subsidizing this? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a question of who needs spectrum, but rather how we should allocate the airwaves in a way that gives the most utility to the greatest number of people. The key is getting as much value for society as possible from a resource that only can go so far.
Television broadcasts aren't the only possible use of spectrum. What about wireless broadband? Or digital terrestrial radio? Or mobile phone service? Every chunk of spectrum occupied by an analog TV channel is one less piece that can be used for something else. With the remarkable technologies that now exist--WiMax, EVDO, and soon LTE--policymakers must realize that spectrum has a whole lot of potential and none of it involves analog anything. Compare the number of people who rely on TV broadcasts to the number of people who subscribe to mobile phone service, and it's quite clear which type of spectrum use is more popular among consumers.
Re:DTV? Hahahaha (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to chuckle at such ideas, but I'm getting there myself. I watched Jericho seasons 1 and 2 over the past couple months thanks to Netflix streaming. Just about everything is released on DVD these days, even short lived series (Firefly and Wonderfalls had nice boxed sets). Even silly Adult Swim stuff. I have enjoyed the first two seasons of Dexter on DVD without ever paying Showtime a monthly fee.
The trick is to get past the "gotta see it now!" feeling from decades of living with live TV. There's also the idea of only paying for what I am watching instead of supporting 50 billion channels I never watch.
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.
Re:This summer's headlines (Score:3, Insightful)
This summer, Congress will conduct hearings on the massive waste and fraud in the program surrounding scores of bogus vendors each selling tens of thousands of fictitious boxes, all with "valid" coupons.
Actually, after the program went live, the agency in charge did kick out a bunch of vendors for fraud.
So I'm pretty sure they got that problem sorted out months and months ago, as I heard them discussing it during a congressional hearing broadcast on CSPAN over the summer (2008). The congressmen on the sub-committee seemed inclined to give them more money for the program if asked.
The coupon people's biggest worry was that lots of people would put it off to the very last minute or would wait till the deadline passed, so the coupon dispensers did not seem inclined to grant any extensions. Their second biggest worry was that there would be idiots who got a coupon and didn't redeem it within 90 days (hi dad) and at the last minute wanted another coupon.
Re:Hidden Cost & Annoyances (Score:3, Insightful)
Shouldn't this be ARM?
Re:yaay (Score:2, Insightful)
Seconded, I am 24 years old and don't have pay-to-watch television. For entertainment I have a DTV box and a 30mbs FiOS connection. Am neither poor nor elderly, but I don't see the point of the current pay-to-watch television system when I can get most anything I want to watch streamed to me on demand from the internet.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just wondering.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Err...let's see...the public's money...that comes from taxpayers, right?
I'm a taxpayer (you'll have to take my word for this, and I do pay a LOT of taxes).
Therefore...I am entitled, authorized and fully qualified to take some of this money back in whatever form, just like any other taxpayer (and even for some reason, those who pay NO taxes).
Sorry...especially in light of people that don't pay taxes...getting tax rebates. I have no problems taking any money from the govt. that is offered out. I think of it as taking my money back.
Re:Depends on how "entitled" you are (Score:3, Insightful)