Digital TV Showdown
You know that digital tv transition, the one that every time you’ve turned on the news in the last year and a half you’ve been reminded it’s coming? You know how you’re so thankful because there’s only a few more weeks until the end of the countdown? Well evidently you might need to get accustomed to seeing the countdown for another few months. I know, it sucks.
They're going to need a new clock.
Evidently there isn’t any money left in the program designed to give people $40 gift cards to buy the things. You know, the program that began LAST JANUARY with a set amount set aside? There’s now a waiting list and Congress is considering putting off the transition date until June so they can get these people their free or reduced cost digital boxes.
Here’s the thing, if they didn’t request their gift card six months ago then oh well. Those are the breaks. If you don’t pay for cable/satelite/IPTV then go buy yourself a digital box, or don’t and read a book instead. The last thing the government needs to be doing right now is shelling out additional money to people who waited to the last minute. If that’s the case, I might as well go collect an unemployment check for the sixteen years of my life I didn’t work. I’m entitled to that too, right?
Give me a break. Obama has vowed to go through the federal budget line by line eliminating useless programs. Let’s hope he starts by refusing to add additional money to a program that people have been adequately warned about. You waited to long? Oh well. Get over it.
Update: Despite the Senate voting for and extension to the transition, the US House voted the bill down thus killing any hopes to prolong the thing. Thank. You. God!
Since Obama is a major proponent of delaying the switch to digital-only in order to give out some more coupons, he’s not likely to refuse adding any money. And, since the Fed is supposed to be making $19B by selling access to the analog spectrum, he may not see a problem with adding to the initial $1.3B allotment for coupons. He may want to double it.
Maybe he’s looking at something like this:
(US population)-(Population with Cable/Satellite TV)=(Amount who might need coupons)
That’s roughly (305M)-(80% of 305M)=61M people who may watch broadcast TV
If they’ve already burned through 32.5M coupons, they’d need another $1.14B for the other 28.5M of them.
I will agree that too many people have waited waaay to long for this. If we’d been reading about this six months ago, it may not be as ridiculous.
The thing is, and I can’t remember which news agency it was, but someone WAS reporting this six months ago. The AP picked up the story two weeks ago and now all of a sudden it’s a crisis.