So, I spent all night cleaning apartment because me and the fiance are leaving for DC this morning. I finally finished around 6:30, which leaves me with exactly thirty minutes before I have to leave to run last minute errands downtown. (Jamaica Plain downtown, not Boston downtown). Instead of sleeping, which I find futile under these conditions, I decided to eat little pieces of cheese and read some stuff that FreePress sent me:
In Move to Digital TV, Confusion is in the Air, NY Times
For once, I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and say that the government, the FCC, and other commercial networks are doing a pretty decent job of informing people about the switch . Although, when I read that most people think that this switch requires them to start buying cable or satellite service, I did narrow my eyes a little at Comcast, whose commercials are vague and slightly condescending enough to nudge people in that direction.
The reason there is still great confusion is quite simple: it's really confusing. I get that. It's also more or less unprecendented, and when you try to do something different and universal, the average joe-shmoe is slow on the uptake, no matter how many times you blast it into his face. It's not his fault, or anyone's. Technology is generally intimidating for middle-aged rug salesmen who just wants to watch CSI after work, because he's generally not interested unless he has to be.
My question is not in the logistics. I know that Feb 17th will be the second coming of hell (whatever that is) for a lot of people. My question is why.
Really, why this government mandated switch? I have no idea. To be fair, I haven't done much digging, but I thought I would pose the question to the masses, because my friends are smarter than the internet.
Another interesting thing of note. When the digital transition was announced, analogue TVs disappeared off the shelf. Whooosh, gone. It's not like they stopped ordering new analogue TVs wholesale, they vanquished them entirely.
What happens now, to those empty airwaves? They don't just disappear. This, I am very very interested in. I feel like it would be a rogue playground for all the basement pirates, a beautiful oasis of DIY indie love, or at least for one dreamer's second. It will probably be quickly snatched up by some one else, some one big, but...who? I don't think for a second that the government is about to let that newly whitewashed airwave frontier go to waste.
It reminds me of Edwin Armstrong and the new days of FM Radio. David Sarnoff of RCA basically sucked him dry of all he had and drove him to suicide because he had discovered, temporarily, a product that RCA did not know how to commodify. I think it's one of the great unsung American tragedies.
Future Post! I plan to talk about zombies a little, and vampires a little more.
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3 comments:
Grace!
In my love and interest for television, I did a great deal of research about this very issue. It was especially relevant when I worked for a PBS affiliate, as you can imagine. Regardless.
The government has been attempting to switch to digital for a while now, and the date has constantly been changing. Moving back, altering. Why digital? Because it allows more room for stations to broadcast more on a smaller space. Which is cool... if you care. It also stimulates interest in HD. And other reasons that I feel are insufficient.
Now, if you were to ask me, and I'm going to pretend like you did, the reason the government/FCC did this is simple: money. The main reason for the transition to digital [or so the FCC says] is that the analog spectrum is now mandated to allow certain amount of frequency to go to emergency services, like fire, police, etc. This has become a more prevalent issue with the lack of proper emergency personnel communication with the attacks and disasters of late. But that's only part of the spectrum [and a small percentage at that]! The rest of the spectrum? It's being sold to the highest bidder. Most notably, it's going to wireless providers to allow more communication and interaction through smaller devices. Although it was believed that Google would be the ones to buy it up, Verizon, AT&T and Google all paid big money for it, totaling $19.6 billion dollars.
$19.6 billion! Where is that money going? Interestingly, only a small percentage of it will go to financing the government coupons for box converters. The rest is going into a void of money and politics that I do not understand. As such, I will leave it to someone else to explain. However, I cannot help but raise my eyebrow and expect corruption in this issue.
In this time of great economic strife, I'm outraged, to be honest, that the FCC has not changed it's mind about the digital transition. However, the spectrum auction has been sold, and, as such, there is no turning back. I actually disagree with you about the public being informed about the transition, but it might be our differences in location.
ALSO, if zombies and vampires fought, it would be an exercise in futility. You can read more about that here:
http://qwantz.com/archive/001364.html
Hey Grace...
Trying to read through what you were saying, and what sarhawke is saying, here's what I can make of it (forgive me, woke up about an hour ago, and still haven't eaten yet):
Grace, part of the reason for the mandated switch is due to the HDTV and SDTV standards, which are both digital. You really can't have these two and have analog at the same time. It would make things a lot more confusing as a result. Transitioning to a single standard makes things a lot easier.
Are there benefits to switching beyond money? Well, certainly. The fact is, DTV takes up a lot less bandwidth than analog. I do not have the exact data in front of me, but if satellite radio (a digital format) is to be of any indication (over 150 channels in a 50 Mhz spectrum), I wouldn't be surprised if the entire spectrum for DTV takes up less than 100 Mhz with hundreds of channels and sub-channels. In comparison, each analog channel is allocated 6 Mhz of spectrum to accomodate bandwidth needs. That's very excessive, don't you think?
Also, there is the matter of improved image quality, but given there's compression involved in the transmission of the signal, I have my doubts there. So, that's pretty much the reason why there is a switch going (that, and practically every other industrialized nation in the world is in the process of doing so).
Now, concerning the whole wireless spectrum being used for other purposes (and thus, sarhawke's arguments): First off, let's be clear: the auction occurred because of the transition to digital, not the other way around. Perhaps one of the hidden intentions of the auction was to push broadcasters to switch to digital, but the auction was not planned until after the transition had been mandated by Congress. And the thing with government auctions is this: It's never about the highest bid but the lowest bid. Many of these "block" auctions yielded below expectations, with one block (fittingly enough, the emergency services block) not even getting the reserve bid.
Now, as per Google's involvement, as someone who watched the whole matter closely, Google was not interested in any part of the spectrum but the largest chunk of it, block C. And in fact, as the auction neared, it became clear that they were not interested in buying any spectrum, which they did not. What they were concerned about was open access to the spectrum. Why? Cos every cell phone provider locks out their spectrum for use on their phones. By opening access, it means any provider or user could use the spectrum without paying heed to the company that owns it. This is why they were involved. Google simply bid on the reserve price for open access, and did not do anything further (Verizon won the block for 4.74 billion. The reserve was 4.6).
As per where the money went, most actually went to the Treasury reserves. Granted, they should have put a bit more money into the coupons for the converter boxes, but it's not in a corruptible state, at least.
Seriously, I don't see what was entirely wrong with the auction, since the transition mandate predated the plans for the auction. And honestly, what else could the empty airwaves be used for than communication? (And, honestly, emergency services don't really need more than 10 Mhz of spectrum. 6 was enough) Thankfully, I don't watch TV, so the transition doesn't really affect me.
(I feel like I rambled a bit, Grace. If so, I apologize. I hope it makes sense. I'm going to eat now)
First, of all, I think this is a relatively well-thought discussion.
I agree that the transition is inevitable. More than this, I think we, as a country whose primary export is media, should have been one of the first to make the transition. Knowing us though we would have screwed it up a lot worse than we're doing right now though, so perhaps I should digress.
What bothers me is the simple math. What was once free to American citizens (television broadcast over the air) is being replaced by something that requires the purchase of more electronic products. Despite the billions of dollars made off of selling portions of the spectrum, these converter boxes are still not being provided free of charge, though the government coupons cover most of the cost.
Additionally, whether considering the $40 the government puts towards each converter box or the remainder that the consumer pays, all funds are going to foreign electronics companies, like LG, who make the boxes. It seems to me that if the FCC had taken more responsibility for this transition by fully funding the converter boxes they could have employed an American manufacturer for their production. This would have employed some skilled Americans in what is turning out to be some hard times.
While I agree this transition is necessary to a degree, I feel like it could have been carried out in a way that didn't reek of forced consumerism. To most of us, $20 dollars on top of a coupon doesn't seem like much. Then again, we probably weren't the ones getting television off the air in the first place. We probably don't need the distraction from the grind as much, either.
Then again..
Perhaps what America needs is to have some plugs pulled. Television viewership has been shown to be a significant contributor to the decline of social trust, taking the place of community and group involvement (General Sociological Survey, and many other sources). I can't imagine that a transition to a bigger and shinier distraction is going to turn that trend around.
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