Now you can procrastinate on getting that digital-conversion gadget for your TV even longer
Congress has finally agreed to push the deadline for retooling TVs to receive digital rather than analogue signals to June 12. Initially, the day that your parents or grandparents would call you up and complain that something was wrong with their TV was supposed to occur Feb. 17.
It's helpful no doubt for the estimated 6.5 million people who haven't yet installed the digital-conversion gizmo to their TVs, and at that point, those $40 rebate coupons might be back in play (they were discontinued in early January, when the administration issuing them ran, like the rest of us, out of money; they tried to slip more coupons into Washington's Big Stimulus Package).
But it's also a headache for local stations deep into the the process of converting their signals from analogue to digital. PBS said running both analogue and digital signals for four months could cost its stations about $22 million.
All this because the government decided to scale back on TV's portion of the spectrum so they could sell more of it to cell-phone companies and say that it was going to homeland security, or something like that. So Aunt Harriet won't be able to watch her stories so your nephew can text his friends while ignoring everyone else at the dinner table. Seems like a fair trade-off, don't you think?
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About this blog
David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place.
The problem is that those DTV converter boxes are worth $40. But knowing that you can get them for $5 or $10 with the government coupon has caused people to avoid buying them until said coupon is in their hands.
And without coupons, nobody's going to buy anything.
I have two boxes working right now. They did cost me $5 each after the coupon.
Again, with everybody expecting to buy them for $5 or $10, the government basically has to keep doling out those coupons, or nobody will buy the boxes and "Days of Our Lives" will continue to lose ...