If you haven’t been paying attention the US government has been manipulated into outlawing analog TV broadcasts in February of 2009. Most people I talk to don’t understand the issue but will soon enough when perhaps millions of TVs around the country suddenly stop working. The big winners? Cable and TV manufacturers who are essentially using their lobby to force people to either purchase a cable box in every room in their home or buy a lot of new TVs. The big losers? The American public.
But in every battle of corporate greed versus the every day man there are those that take things to a whole new level of absurdity. So without further ado, I present Best Buy’s approach, to place an exciting countdown bar on their home page:
In related news, there was a number of recent articles on the subject saying how nations around the world are years ahead of the US because instead of shutting their analog network down, they are leveraging them to provide free TV for cell phone users throughout the country.
I’m all for technology upgrades but this one seems unnecessary to me. In particular, there’s no justification for why we need to shut down the old network. We could have both running for many years and give Americans time to adjust. Cable companies fought harder than anyone on this, the dream of using a cable feed for multiple TVs in the house is a thing of the past. Got 5 TVs in your home? That will be 5 cable boxes billed monthly, please.
>Cable and TV manufacturers who are
>essentially using their lobby to force people
>to either purchase a cable box in every room
>in their home or buy a lot of new TVs.
Or to buy a government subsidized digital converter box. The box is $60+ tax and the coupon is $40. You can buy up to two heavily discounted boxes per household. Granted those with more than two TVs have to pay market price if they want free digital reception on all channels. Now the cable company can charge more for digital. Of course, they are essentially a monopoly and can do that anyway. This just gives them an excuse.
What I don’t get is how this forces you to buy a cable box in every room. Isn’t wanting cable what forces that? If you don’t have a cable box in a room now, I would think that means you have over the air tv. Aside from buying a converter box, how does that change? Maybe I’m missing something about how cable works here.
> I’m all for technology upgrades but this one seems unnecessary to
> me. In particular, there’s no justification for why we need to
> shut down the old network. We could have both running for many
> years and give Americans time to adjust.
I actually have a justification. The government tried that and it turned into a giant game of chicken. The “cutoff date” has moved several times. (This time is real.) What happened the first time was the TV manufacturers ignored the date – there wasn’t demand for HDTVs by the masses because there was no impending deadline. The over the air TV stations hardly had any HD content because the masses didn’t have digital TVs. And the masses didn’t have any reason to buy a HDTVs – there was hardly any content and most of the HDTVs were large expensive models. I just started seeing sub 20 inch models recently.
I think both Radio Shack and Best Buy have done an admirable job on advertising the converter boxes. Both have a link near the top of their home page. If you click on it, the page explains about the digital coverter boxes.
I bought a converter box because I want to have TV reception if/when the cable goes out. I don’t like being hostage to the cable company to receive emergency broadcasting.
What gets me is that digital reception isn’t as “good” as analog. If you get a clear signal, it is better. If you get a weak signal, it is almost unwatchable. Trees and the like interfere more as well. And this problem is supposed to be worse in rural areas. Some stations will be boosting the signal in February, so we’ll see if that makes a difference.
Now I’m not thrilled about the digital revolution and think some people will be worse off. I also think there is a lot of FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) being spread. The cable companies and tv manufacturers are hardly helping here.
> What I don’t get is how this forces you to
> buy a cable box in every room. Isn’t wanting
> cable what forces that?
That’s not true actually (although that’s changing). If you don’t have a cable box you can usually get basic cable (first 60 channels or so). In general, most of the channels past this are garbage, so in many cases cable boxes are only worthwhile if you if you like Noggin or need 16 channels of Showtime. As I said though, there are some exceptions. I’ve seen cases where certain channels in the lower digits were missing in action without a cable box, I suspect on purpose since they used to be part of basic cable.