US Digital TV Switchover Delayed Until June 334
necro81 writes "The Delay DTV Act was passed first by the Senate, now by the House, and will be signed by the President. The hard cutoff for turning off analog TV broadcasts in the US has been pushed out to June 12th. The act had earlier failed to gain a 2/3rds majority in the House, but passed this afternoon with a simple majority. The bill allows stations to cease analog transmissions at any point between Feb 17th (the old cutoff) and June 12th, and many have signaled they will do so."
House vote: 264-158 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Many stations switchin anyway... (Score:5, Informative)
One of the PBS stations in Denver had a problem that shut down their analog tower in December. They decided it wasn't worth it to fix it, and so have been running crawls all last month about how they're DTV only now.
Re:Confusion (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Deja vu (Score:5, Informative)
In June, you'll find that there are many people who have not bought digital receivers for their televisions. June is the new February.
Actually, most TV stations are still going to do the change on Feb 17th as planned. The bill just gives them the option to delay out until June.
Disclaimer, I work for a cable provider, and ALL of our market affiliates have already told us they are going to change on the 17th as planned.
So basically this bill was a waste of time. Ten years from now, people will still be pulling out old TV's and wondering why they don't work.
Re:Many stations switchin anyway... (Score:5, Informative)
The FCC has rules about how many hours of things like public service you have to run to keep your license.
Until February 17, the calculation comes from the analog signal.
So, a station could have just killed the analog early without getting special FCC approval, but then they would have lost their license for both analog and digital.
Likewise, a station can just choose to "go dark", but if they don't meet the FCC regulations, they won't have a license an more if they want to turn back on again. Since good frequencies are worth money (both in the ability to cover more area and in branding goodwill for channel numbers), most would be snapped up by someone else pretty quickly, like domains that expire.
Re:Confusion (Score:4, Informative)
Not really.
If you have your converter, you won't notice. No confusion.
If you don't then you may seem some stations go away.
It's not that easy. TV stations in the VHF-High band (channels 7-13) are currently transmitting the digital version of themselves in the higher UHF channels. After they stop their analog transmissions, they'll move their digital transmissions to their VHF-High channels.
Thus many major stations (4 out of the 7 big VHF stations here) will move around after the transition. Now that transition will be gradual and not so predictable. Stations will be moving around, and we'll have to keep rescanning or otherwise updating our tuners, either in converter boxes or new TVs.
Re:Didn't the state already auction this bandwidth (Score:3, Informative)
Yes and yes. If you watched any of the 'debate' on the House floor, just about all the stakeholders wrote letters buying in to the delay.
Re:Confusion (Score:3, Informative)
>>>B) It important to a lot of people.
No not really. Only 5% of the nation is not ready according to Nielsen Ratings. The other 95% have cable, dish, or DTV boxes. Here in Pennsylvania the number is 99% ready, and that's probably true throughout most of the I-95 corridor. This postponement is ridiculous. We not only have a majority ready to switch, but a super-duper Constitutional majority (greater than three-fourths) ready for the switch.
Too late for Hawaii, Fine By Me (Score:3, Informative)
In particular, they wanted the old antenna down before the nesting time for an endangered seabird at the 9500' level on Haleakala. As goes Maui, so goes the rest of 808. Naturally, we've got some mainland transplants on Maui moaning, who not only relocated from the mainland to Hawaii, but with malice of forethought bought places out half way out to Hana.
Now that the Maui antenna is down at the 4000' antenna farm in Ulupalakua, there's a few miles of solid basalt that's attenuating their signal a tad, and these people are complaining. Why wasn't it put further up the mountain, they whine. Because a 300' mast looks like shit that high up on the ridge line, in a primitive area.
The more the island looks like shit, the fewer the visitors to spend money... which would prolly be just fine for the M$/Boeing/trustfund scumbags who loaded up their truck and moved to Hawai'i. Islands, that is. Mango trees, technology.
Re:Confusion (Score:4, Informative)
There's a limited amount of space on the EM Band, therefore the government has to enforce rules just the same as it enforces rules on roads. Without rules, you'd have chaos with some stations showing analog, others digital, and likely with lots of interference. By placing the FCC in charge, you eliminate the "crashes" of overlapping stations.
Re:Confusion (Score:4, Informative)
President Obama *pressured* Congress to pass a law to delay the switchover.
...great disturbance... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Confusion (Score:3, Informative)
ATSC channels all broadcast a logical channel assignment, and that's what your PVR is going to use. So if your local "NBC-4" affiliate switches from UHF 48 down to some other assignment (could go back to VHF 4, but most are not returning to the lower VHF band), you'll still see it in the tuner as logical 4.
If you're already digital, the only real effect here is that, for OTA stuff, you'll potentially have to re-scan more than once. There's a 99% chance that your local station already has their switch-off/switch-over plans online.
And of course, all those upper UHF channels (700MHz band, channels above UHF 51) are going away, at least once analog is fully switched off, if not before then. They're the channels most folks are having trouble with. It's not simply the greater propagation loss due to higher frequency, but the simple fact that most consumer antenna and amplifier gear that claims "50-1000MHz" or whatever is usually crap beyond 600MHz or so anyway.
Re:Deja vu (Score:5, Informative)
I'm wondering why so many commenters think it's so bad that the switch is delayed?
Let me count the ways.
1. Not having all broadcasters switch at once is going to be a confounding mess, even for those of us who have already switched. I'm currently using a big UHF-only antenna that I've been relying on for the last two years, because the current pre-switch digital signal is weak and UHF only. Post-switch, some broadcasters are moving their digital signal to VHF and all of them were going to be boosting the signal. Now, with the VHF band still tied up as some (but not all) migrate, there are likely to be days when NOBODY can tune in every channel with a single antenna/tuner combination. Yuck!
2. A good chunk of the freed-up bandwidth was meant to be used by emergency responders, who have made a significant investment in equipment which will now collect dust for six months.
3. A lot of businesses have started up with the plan of buying/leasing former analog VHF bandwidth. These companies now must sit on ice for six more months and pray that they don't go belly-up before they even get a chance to open.
4. Of the 5 percent that are not ready, most of them will still not "get ready" before June. Losing your TV signal for a little while is not the end of the world, and having their screens go to static is probably exactly what it takes to get them off the couch and waddling down to the store to pick up a cheap converter.
5. Local broadcasters are in a bind, because their business plans didn't call for six more months of sending two signals, but if they do take the option of switching on the 17th, they risk losing customers.
6. Current digital signals are so week, that outer-ring "exurbs" in most metro areas can't consistently tune them in. During the switch DTV signals are expected to become a lot more powerful, making the broadcasts much more widely available... but if everything is not switched at once it's going to mean that those communities will lose some of their analog signals before the digital signal is strong enough to reach them. They go dark because a handful of people were too lazy to take advantage of a converter coupon. It's idiotic.
Anything else you are wondering about?
Re:Deja vu (Score:3, Informative)
Even worse is that in some markets, a station will be switching its DTV broadcasts to a channel that is currently in use for analog broadcasts by another station.
For example, in Detroit, Fox uses 2 for analog broadcasts, 58 for pre-transition digital, and will use 7 for post-transition digital. But ABC uses 7 for analog. So Fox can't switch unless ABC does so first.