Ben Berkowitz is the business news editor at AOL. His weekly column highlights business stories with significant implications that were overlooked at first glance.
The story you didn't read this week but should have is the news that the Commerce Department is going to make $40 coupons available to people with TVs that can't tune digital signals and aren't hooked up to satellite or cable.
This is important because, in less than two years, analog TV as we know it will end in the United States. From February 17, 2009, stations must broadcast in digital only. The reason of course is money; it takes a lot less spectrum to broadcast digital signals than analog, and all those analog airwaves are worth untold billions of dollars.
So it's in Uncle Sam's best interest to ensure that the switchover happens, and the best way to do that is to do the heavy lifting (financially) for those who still love their rabbit ears.
Here's the funny part though (funny as in "oh geez not again," not "hah hah" funny): to get one of these $40 coupons from Uncle Carlos (AKA Commerce Secretary Gutierrez), all you have to do is ask.
Even if you don't need one, you can still go to a special National Telecommunications and Information Administration Web site starting Jan. 1, 2008 and request up to two $40 coupons per household. (Each converter will be about $50). The best part is this: if the initial $990 million in coupons runs out, the NTIA can ask Congress for $510 million more.
Anyone else like the odds for fraud/abuse/malfeasance in this program at around 100 percent?
Of course, digital over-the-air television has not necessarily been the success in the United States that it has elsewhere. Almost no one noticed, but this past Monday USDTV shut down its service. For the last four years, people in parts of Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Dallas and Albuquerque have been able to get as many as 30 channels via a regular, old-fashioned antenna and a set-top box.
USDTV went bankrupt last summer, was revived in the fall, but now seems to be gone for good. By some accounts it had just 14,000 subscribers. Compared that with Great Britain, where virtually the same sort of service, Freeview, has something like 7.7 million subscribers. (As opposed to USDTV, Freeview carries no monthly subscription, just a one-time fee to buy a set-top box).
The converter boxes the U.S. government will subsidize are not even so fancy as that. All it will do is take the regular digital signals that TV stations send and convert them to analog for playback. (Imagine if you friend had an iPod and you only had a cassette deck. You like a song your friend has so you use a cable to record it off the iPod onto a tape deck so you can play it back in your 1980s-era Walkman. Same theory, essentially).
Whatever stations you get now over the air will be the same ones you get with the converter, plus any extra digital stations your local broadcasters choose to send. (In New York for example, the NBC stations sends a 24-hour weather station on one of its spare channels; the ABC station loops some of its older newscasts on a secondary channel).
So in short: in two years you'll need to spend $50 to see the same programs you see now for free. Unless you get a coupon from the government. Unless someone who needs it less than you gets it first. Unless the government decides to spend some more money on the program. Unless people lie to keep getting the coupons.
Anyone read any good books lately?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-16-2007 @ 1:53PM
marschhauser said...
are we going to supply people with tvs as well ? /