House Defeats Bill to Delay Digital TV Transition

If these people are so dependant on their televisions then they know this is comming. They watch a lot of T.V. This has been comming for years.
 
MasonL87 said:
You're asking where the billions of dollars went? Really? Is that even worth answering at this point? You KNOW what happened to that money. Some greedy politicians pocketed it, and since greedy politicians are governed by more greedy politicians, nobody important thinks to ask about the missing truckload of money.
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/cough
Unaccounted for Democratic campaign contributions...
/cough
Probably not... but we will never be sure with the way Obama's campaign finance was run. ;)

Seriously though, the current bailout bill has an extra $650 million in it for coupons. Just think of how that will stimulate the economy!
 
Max Mike said:
It will count on it... and it will pass the floor vote. :mad:
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But think of all the poor and rural people that will be affected if it doesn't pass!!! This is practically life-saving to those people!!!
 
matchstick said:
Thank gawd this didn't pass...

There is no break on owning cable or satellite TV why should there be one for this?

Hell I live paycheck to paycheck and I have been OTA HD ready for 2 years.
I am also a Democrat that believes in cutting programs and not raising taxes.
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The issues here is this, since so many people just don't fucking get it:

The government has taken a direct action that renders a citizens TV inoperable for OTA use and has taken money from interested 3rd parties (IE: the cell operators) to do so. ATSC is a shitty technology, 8VSB is a shitty modulation for UHF. But powerful interests ensured that this sub optimal solution was the one chosen so they could have access to the lucrative VHF spectrum. Funny, the FCC gets billions from the cell guys for the VHF band and they SHOCKINGLY approves ATSC for the UHF band. Wow. No conflict of interest there.

So yeah, the feds have once again fucked the tax payer. One with the sell (or cell) out to the wireless operators and then again with the cash hand out in the form of coupons.

Someone tell me how any of these actions, on either end of the bend over lube-less hose job is in the interest of the taxpayer?

And for those of you who think ATSC is awesome? Good for you and whatever flat as a pancake place you live. 8VSB sucks for people who can look out their window and not die from boredom.

Hey I wonder if we'll see this again if ATSC2 gets rolled out? LOL.
 
If they government is mandating that people's TVs are no longer functional because of lobbying from telecoms and broadcasters, then they should foot the cost of replacing them.
 
In other news the government wants to spend 650,000,0000 to help folks convert. :rolleyes:
 
1EZduzit said:
I do know that if you live in a rural area your very dependent on the television for the weather forecasts and it's going to suck if one day your TV (that you paid good money) which through no fault of your own, doesn't work anymore. Why should those people have to shell out there hard earned bucks to fix a mess the goverment made?
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My Grandmother, before she past on last year, lived in rural Missouri. The woman could cook anything and grow any vegetable with ease...but she barely understood technology. God love her, she looked and acted identical to the lady in that parody thats floating around youtube. She saw the commercial and atleast understood that television would stop working at one point. She understood she would have to purchase something (albeit converter doohickey as she called it) to get it to still work. She equated the transition as similiar to having to buy a new FM radio to listen to more stations when all she had was an AM radio.

She survived great depression and the dust bowl without a radio or a television (which weren't even available yet). And understood that like all entertainment, her TV was not essential for living.

People have survived thousands of years without weather forecasts. People have also survived when governments have restricted their entertainment venues before.

People will survive, the government may or may not learn from the fuck up, AND LET TECHNOLOGY EVOLVE FOR FUCKS SAKE, get the DTV transition over with.
 
jimmyb said:
If they government is mandating that people's TVs are no longer functional because of lobbying from telecoms and broadcasters, then they should foot the cost of replacing them.
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Hence...vouchers? Am I missing something?

1). Most newer TV's are ready already
2). If you have cable or satellite you're ready
3). If you use OTA signals, the government has offered a voucher so you can go buy a converter for little to no cost.
4). Picture quality is better with ATSC than NTSC.
5). If the govt. is auctioning off frequencies, who cares, it doesn't really affect you. See 1-4.
 
ianken said:
The FCC has done a very poor job of communicating what this all means for people who are not tech savvy.
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Are you fucking kidding me? I've seen ads, and even watched part of one of the 30 minute infomercial-style things about this, and they literally spoon feed this information to you. You do not have to be tech savvy to understand this. You have to be clinically retarded, or very elderly, to not understand what is going on, and in either of those situations, we are talking about people who should have a caretaker who does.
 
kirbyrj said:
Hence...vouchers? Am I missing something?

1). Most newer TV's are ready already
2). If you have cable or satellite you're ready
3). If you use OTA signals, the government has offered a voucher so you can go buy a converter for little to no cost.
4). Picture quality is better with ATSC than NTSC.
5). If the govt. is auctioning off frequencies, who cares, it doesn't really affect you. See 1-4.
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I meant the companies that are pushing the transition should be paying for the replacements, not the government.
 
jimmyb said:
I meant the companies that are pushing the transition should be paying for the replacements, not the government.
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Quite right. Because in this case the government = the tax payer. The government isn't paying for anything.
 
Precisely. I'm busting my ass and getting raped in taxes for some asshole who is too lazy to get off his/her ass to buy a $50 converter box or a non-20-year-old television or cable/sat box. Honestly now.. converter box coupons at the tone of hundreds of millions of dollars are not an essential part of government that needs funding. I know people who live in Detroit project housing that live off my tax money that have HDTVs and cell phones. hah..
 
w1retap said:
Precisely. I'm busting my ass and getting raped in taxes for some asshole who is too lazy to get off his/her ass to buy a $50 converter box or a non-20-year-old television or cable/sat box. Honestly now.. converter box coupons at the tone of hundreds of millions of dollars are not an essential part of government that needs funding. I know people who live in Detroit project housing that live off my tax money that have HDTVs and cell phones. hah..
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And probably hit up the casino too unless Detroit has changed since the last time I was there.
 
Walmart has a box for like 10 bucks that lets old tv's get digital signals. No matter how broke you are you can come up with 10 bucks.
 
Radio isn't affected by this, you can get weather reports on the radio. I really don't want this drawn out any more...I am tired of this whole thing. I think this transition will be a great thing, sometimes you just have to rip the bandaid off. I go back and forth about the coupon program. I am not a fan of the government being so cavalier about how they are spending my money. They just seem to be hemmoraging it. I do think, absolutely, that the people whining the worst about it are generally fairly annoying. It's been publicized heavily for at least a year and a half now. People just haven't been acting on any of the information they have gotten, which is their own fault.
 
There's a "blue market" for these coupons now. In the apartment building I live in, they have "free" in-house programming, paid for by the management through a local service provider (just DirecTV content, basically, and only about 25 channels of the really basic stuff). On that provider's "information channel" they regularly advertise that they'll buy two $40 coupons for $30 so, I ordered mine with the intention of selling 'em, actually.

We (meaning the Wife and I) have a TV but we rarely watch it, to be honest. I just got one of those HP 23" LCDs from Geeks.com last week, grabbed an HD/Digital TV tuner from Fry's and now I watch OTA stuff here from Vegas, decent quality signals and picture so far. Cox here in Vegas is supposed to provide clear QAM content for the local channels only, but as I only use them for cable Internet, I don't feel like forking over another $12 a month just to get the same channels over the cable line that I can pick up with the damned antenna that came with the tuner...

I still can't figure out why the gubbamint is forcing this "transition" on people... it smacks too much of "V For Vendetta" where the gubbamint forces and requires everyone to have a damned "box" on their TVs they control, programming they control, etc.

This isn't about creating a standard to make things easier, it's about control, and nothing more.
 
All I can say is that I was pissed as shit a few weeks ago when I went to go visit a Best Buy store to buy a DTV converter box. My voucher still had 4 weeks left until it expired and when the clerk ran it through the scanner, it said it had no funds. BAH!

He tried several times until finally getting another employee to try and help. They told me I would have to contact the phone number on the card and ask what was going on. The clerk then asked, "So, are you going to buy this or .. no?" I just stood and stared at him with a blank face. "Na, I was hoping that you could just discount me $40 since it's a Government voucher."

Here's your sign.

Stupid government funding and stupid Best Buy making me look like an idiot. :mad:
 
jimmyb said:
I meant the companies that are pushing the transition should be paying for the replacements, not the government.
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It was the goverments idea if I remember right so they could auction off the rights to the broadcast spectrum for new uses.
 
90% of the people who say the transition is BS also don't realize that the most prime chunks of the spectrum are going to emergency services, not the carriers. Working for a TV provider allows me the good fortune of hearing all the elderly and technologically inept complain about this like it was the worst idea in the world. I want to tell them that when they have a seizure and are fishing out on the floor, part of the quick response is due to the transition.

I do think Kevin Martin was a complete D-Bag and fumbled parts of the transition. But I agree that it should just happen. People have had long enough to prepare and if they can't be grown-ass adults and make sure they're ready for it then they need to go outside or read a book.
 
matchstick said:
I am also a Democrat that believes in cutting programs and not raising taxes.
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How do you do that? What are you, like a repulbicrat or a democan or something?

Raising taxes and adding countless, wasteful, bloated, wealth-spreading, free-handout, government programs are the very core things democrats are about? How does one be a democrat, while opposing the core of the democrat platform?

That's like a Christian that believes in Buddha, or an athiest sayin prayers. That are the make not sense.
 
darkpaw said:
Yah its not over, they just didn't vote to close off debate right now. It'll be back and unfortunately it'll pass.
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Well, it's not a 'close of debate' issue - that'd be the Senate. In the House, bills normally have to follow regular order. That means they sit at the desk for a certain period of time so members have a chance to review the legislation, they get reported out of committee, etc. What they tried to do here was suspend the rules and pass it, which requires a 2/3 vote. Since that failed, they can easily bring it up again under a rule that outlines the terms of the debate. The downside (to the House) with that approach is that it would require a minimum of four hours of floor time to discuss in most cases: 2 hours to debate the rule (which becomes a debate of the bill itself), followed by a roll call vote on the rule, followed by 2 more hours of debate on the bill, followed by a roll call vote. With the stimulus package and other items on the docket, they were hoping for a shortcut.

The end result is the same - it probably will pass since the Dems have the numbers; it'll just take a bit longer.
 
In most areas, it won't matter if it's delayed or not. I know that in the Madison, WI area they've said the analog signal is going bye bye on the 17th regardless of it being delayed or not.

The only thing the delay will do is allow people to keep getting coupons and not require the stations to kill the analog signal.
 
Most of the retailers around my area still have stacks of converter boxes available and large signs posted with information about the switch.
The local news channels have been running 5 seconds "tests" where they switch to digital to see if people are ready.
One station even has a "TV hotline" where people can call in to ask questions about the switch.
There have been infomercials, government commercials, commericals from local stations, commercials from the cable company, and commercials from retailers all explaining the switch and who needs to buy a box and how to get a coupon.

Anyone in this area that is not prepared for the switch does not have my sympathy.

As far as the "missing coupons" I have seen news stories about people getting coupons and buying converter boxes even though they had digital ready equipment or received their programming through cable.
 
matchstick said:
Thank gawd this didn't pass...

Personally I think they should never have given out coupons in the first place. It's a waste of taxpayer money. Watching TV is a luxury not an inalienable right.

There is no break on owning cable or satellite TV why should there be one for this?

It pisses me off that a percentage of my money is going to millions of people that think they MUST have TV.

Hell I live paycheck to paycheck and I have been OTA HD ready for 2 years.
I am also a Democrat that believes in cutting programs and not raising taxes.
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Probably the only reason a portion of our money is being used for this is the Emergency Brodcast System.

But yeah, I'm glad this bill didnt pass. People have had plenty of time to prepare for this.
 
Good. Enough already. Let's get it done!

And maybe the sale of 6 million TV's will kick-start the economy :)
 
Their own numbers in the bill said 6.5 MILLION homes not ready, but in the Stimulus bill their is money for 16 MILLION boxes.... I'm like WTF, anyone read thier own reports over there? :eek::rolleyes::p

Who got bribed by the converter box company to puff up the numbers?
 
Good .. if you don't know about the switchover, or you aren't prepared at his point ... i'm not so sure you should own a TV. Every channel has a ticker pop up along the bottom of the screen every few hours.
 
The procrastinators with have to get with the damn program or get left behind. Best news I've heard. FTW.
 
If you're one of the supposed 6 million people that haven't gotten off your ass and bought a cheap ass converter box, or god forbid, a new TV in the past 5 years, maybe it's time you got... off... your...ass... and started being productive or informed so you could afford the $20 it would cost you. If you can't afford to upgrade your TV or buy a simple converter box, then maybe you have more pressing issues that you need to worry about and you're better off not turning the TV on. That 2nd job might be a better choice than watching the pathetic crap you can pick up OTA all day and night.

That's right, it's time to put the beer can down and stop feeling sorry for yourself. And by the way, that case of Bud you just drank would have almost paid for the converter.
 
I wish they would of had the digital switch before the Super Bowl, that would of been funny.
 
These same people that are complaining about the switchover are the ones looking into YOUR wallet to get some.
 
RangerXML said:
I wish they would of had the digital switch before the Super Bowl, that would of been funny.
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That would've definitely gotten people out to buy TV's. Every week of the Super Bowl, TV sales at my store seem to just skyrocket.
 
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