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.