Feds start wait list for DTV converter box coupons | KOMO News — This is going to be a fiasco, you can see it coming down Broadway.
Consumers who apply for federal coupons to pay for converter boxes ahead of next month’s transition to digital television broadcasts are being placed on a waiting list and may not receive their vouchers before the switchover, the Commerce Department said Monday.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the arm of the Commerce Department administering the coupon program, created the waiting list on Sunday after hitting a $1.34 billion funding limit set by Congress.
The agency will send out coupons to those on the list only as unredeemed coupons currently in circulation expire, freeing up more money for the program. The waiting list already has requests for 103,000 coupons.
Found by Aric Mackey.
amodedoma:
Most converter boxes in stores start at $60, a few are $50.
mister mustard:
Estimates are 15% of the population watches only OTA TV. That translates to 15 million households.
At this point, when we have been informed now for 13 years of the digital switchover, and you cannot go 20 minutes without hearing about it, including crawls during programming, I find it hard to believe there is anyone who is not aware of it.
13# It was a rough first couple weeks, not having that friend/noise in the house, but after that no problems. Amazing how much more reading and stuff around the house I got done.
16# Yea I have friends also who watch DVD’s non stop. And to be honest I dont know how they find the time to watch 3 or 4 in a weekend. I maybe play 1 a month.
Its often said that tv is passive while reading actively engages the imagination. I do lots of both and find very little difference between the two. I select books I like and tv I like==so there is already a screening process taking place. It is a different experience, each with their pro’s and con’s.
Devoting enough time to fixing the house or car is required of tv or of reading just the same.
Anti-tv SNOBS==what do you think you get out of it that justifies you feeling so smug about it?
You know what, my computer is getting a bit old and can’t play the latest games anymore. Shouldn’t the government give me a coupon for a new video card?
That’s how I feel about this whole situation.
There’s a crazy old guy down the street from me who’s hoarding these converter boxes for some reason. He’s got at least 15 coupons now. He goes around asking the neighbors to order their two and give them to him. I have a feeling that people like him are the problem here.
#24:
If the government disabled all the old video cards, then yeah, they should give you a coupon for a new one.
This process, getting ready for HDTV and to a lesser extent ATSC, started 20 years ago.The government has been telling people for 2 years that NTSC was going they way of the dodo bird by 2009. I bought a HDTV w/ATSC tuner years ago and love it. Screw NTSC, it sucks. For those that need more than 20 years to figure shit out you deserve what you get.
I don’t see why everyone thinks this is going to be a disaster. Let me get this straight, if you watch TV you know about the switchover. There are ads and stories about it all the time. If you don’t watch TV then what’s the problem? This is like Y2K all over again. A bunch of people worry that the world is going to come to an end, talk about it incessantly so that everybody is sick of listening to it and when the day comes nothing happens.
Come on John, you always make fun of the doom-sayers predicting the end of the world and now you are starting to sound like one. My prediction? The truly ignorant will be surprised by the switch-over and not be able to watch Wheel-of-Fortune for a few days. Big deal.
I watch so little TV that I hadn’t noticed that my digital converter box wasn’t picking up the local FOX station. I wouldn’t have cared much, except that some friends were coming over to watch a football game on FOX. The guy at Best Buy said that FOX owns a stake in one of the satellite TV providers, so they transmit their signal at lower power than the other local stations, so an $80 powered antenna was needed.
I gave away my analog TV to a friend last month, and enjoy watching DVD movies on the 50″ plasma TV that I bought with the savings from not having had cable for a few years.
B.Dog, you got ripped off by the guy at Best Buy. You probably needed a new antenna feed cable, or a UHF antenna, or to aim your existing antenna better. But, enjoy the new TV and thanks for stimulating the economy.
One thing about VSB NTSC…the signal could be shit and you still hear it and watch it through the snow if you had to. Now, you have to have a “decent” antenna system.
#26 – GF
>>Screw NTSC, it sucks.
Why?
I think we’ll see another government bail-out here. Obama will stimulate the economy by sending everyone in the U.S. a free digital converter box.
Well, I for one refuse to pay for television. I have never had cable or satellite (except the last few years at my parent’s house when they got cable). For me, it is a matter of principle. I won’t pay for something that is bombarding me from the sky
.
I don’t watch a whole lot of television, but I did get my coupons and converter boxes rather early on. They work fine, in fact, in general, I get better reception than I did with analogue, except for the drop outs when someone walks by or turns on a light switch or the fridge cycles on. Lots more channels, too…what amazing stuff….NBC STILL running the Olympics on 4.4, a useless weather channel on 4.3, infomercials on 4.2, and of course the usual NBC network crap on 4.1. Although in theory I now get about 25 more channels, the only worthwhile thing is the occasional cooking show on one of the PBS affiliates that I can now see at a more reasonable time. Of course when I’m somewhere with cable, there are another 100 channels of “not much to watch”.
I do however predict a small fiasco on “D” day. Despite the fact that the warnings have been blasted at the viewing audience for months now, a lot of the “VCR blinking 12:00″ crowd will be stunned that their TV has stopped working. Many OTA viewers are very non-technical, and the adds generally give a URL for more information. A goodly number of these folks don’t know what a URL is. Some will assume the set is broken, buy a new one that, though they don’t know it has a digital tuner, and be fine. The rest will be on the phone to broadcasters, repair shops, and their reps., whose numbers they looked up in a paper telephone book.
Finally, for those confusing the coupon program with some kind of bailout, let’s set the record straight. The government is making a killing selling the “publicly owned airwaves” that will be freed up. The cost of the coupon program is a very, very small fraction of the revenue that will be produced.
Since all the converter boxes are made in the Far East, I don’t think this is gonna be much of a stimulus to the ecomony.
Oh, and if you are one of those getting a box, the best deal/best box is the Zenith/Insignia (goes by both names) box. There are cheaper boxes, but they mostly suck. The Zenith/Insignia box can be purchased (under the Insignia name) for the cost of shipping + your government rebate card.
Mr Mustard what have you been watching for 30 years?
I watch over-the-air TV because I see no point in paying Dish Network for them. Dish Network provides me with 200 channels the majority of which I don’t care about. For traditional network and local It’s a set of rabbit-ears.
I bought converter boxes and they work quite well. They should work even better after the change. Most current ATSC stations are interim installations. After Feb the stations will move to their final set up using their assigned channels and main antennas.
17 said:
“Sat does not carry LOCAL channels..CABLe DOES..
SAT adds a Local Antenna to get LOCAL..if they go digital, you wont see them.”
Wow, so wrong wrong wrong.
DirecTV and Dish do carry local stations up on the satellite and deliver them to the boxes via the dish. The providers will take care of any conversions on their end and satellite viewers who get their local market stations shouldn’t see any difference on 2/18.
“SAT adds a Local Antenna to get LOCAL..if they go digital, you wont see them.”
I know Dish allows you to connect your own TV antenna to some of their boxes as an option to pull in local stations (and put them up on the program guide also, BTW) instead of paying $5 month to get them off the satellite, and their boxes accept either an off-air DIGITAL signal or the current analog from your antenna. So again, if that’s how your local signal gets into your satellite box, nothing will change there either (provided your antenna and location permit pickup of the digital signals). Those digital signals have been up and running for months now in most locations so satellite users who do this already know if their situation will pull in the stations or not.
Bottom line is, you will not need a converter box to view local off-airs if you bring those in over your satellite box in either situation.
The problem is that lots of elderly folks won’t be able to watch the local news. If only 1% of the elderly don’t have a converter box, that’s 4 million people who are going to be pissed off on D-day. Seems like a problem to me.
#34 – WmDE
>>Mr Mustard what have you been watching for
>>30 years?
Same shit as everyone else, I guess. Law & Order reruns, MTV (back in the early 80′s, anyway, before it turned to shit), CNBC, Discovery Channel, History Channel, like that. You know, stuff you can’t get OTA. And I lived for a while in Indiana, and couldn’t get shit OTA except for one useless local station that wasn’t even worth having a TV for. I had cable before VCRs were even affordable, fer chrissakes.
I don’t really watch too much TV, but when I do, pretty much nothing I watch comes OTA. Of course, the basic cable doesn’t cost very much, so it’s no financial hardship.
I guess the 10% – 15% OTA number must be in the ballpark, as that’s what everyone seems to think it is.
Still, I’m stunned.
I know old people, young people, middle-aged people, rich people, poor people, middle-class people, technogeeks, and luddites. But for the life of me, I can’t think of a single soul that gets a TV signal via the antenna of their TV.
# 30 Mister Mustard
Creating color for NTSC, which originally was B&W, was a hack that is susceptible to hue shift due to signal interference and cheap TV’s. In the industry the joke is that NTSC is said to stand for never (twice) the same color.
Also, the color gamut, the range of color, is more limited than it is with digital – yes digital is still limited – thus making it hard to shoot different shades of the color red. In other words the color is better represented in ATSC* than NTSC.
And finally ATSC allows for high definition broadcast channels, thank the lords of kobal. It really is better in high def.
# 28 As far as Fox transmitting in low power because they want to f with people, well, that’s bullshit. They would be violating FCC standards if they did not attempt to provide the best signal to their service area as effectively as possible. They’d lose their license if you could prove they were doing this maliciously.
After February 17th – when there are no more waivers for broadcasters in large markets – if you and others are still having problems you could make a complaint to the FCC . Keeping up a technical standard is really what the FCC’s job is, not whether we see Janet’s boobie.
*Of course ATSC does have some lower quality standards but generally those are not used for broadcast.
Once the vouchers run out, I expect the converter boxes to come down in price by almost exactly $20 almost immediately. I expect some older ones to start showing up in Goodwill stores soon after that.