DTV day, a deadline that has been deferred once but won't be delayed again, is tomorrow. The transition to digital television is a story of procrastination.
FCC chair Michael Copps, appointed on the eve of the originally scheduled February 17 DTV cutover, recently told a Los Angeles audience, "We've got some humps and bumps to navigate; there's still a number of people who don't know what to do. We knew this transition was coming, the government was late getting itself organized ... but we are where we are and have to make this transition."
Former Washington State Gov. Gary Locke, now Secretary of Commerce in the Obama administration, says its not all government's fault -- its ours. "There are so many people who are always waiting until the last minute, whether it is college students doing term papers, or people filing taxes, or people like me who wait until Christmas Eve to do their shopping."
South Dakota didn't procrastinate. They cut over according to the original time line. And according to state CIO Otto Doll (who also runs public broadcasting in the state) it worked -- and the demand for assistance from technical staff and a corps of volunteers was less than expected. When we talked last month, he noted that the nature of digital signals -- that they are there or they are not without the fade-in fade-out forgiveness of their analog predecessors -- caused some outlying residents in his largely rural state to lose TV reception. Doll is melancholy on this point, not so much for the loss of television signals per se but as another symptom of the marginalization (and depopulating) of frontier states.
The people whose TV sets became paper weights earlier this spring will have some company on Friday morning. Nielsen, the TV audience measurement company, estimates that 2.8 million households, or 2.5% of the TV market, will be left behind, despite the efforts of government, industry and community groups. Their efforts apparently did some good. Neilsen final estimate is less than half the 5.8 million TV household who that were unprepared in February.
For those who are still are not ready, the FCC has pressed 4,000 phone operators into service to stand by through the weekend to handle calls coming through their information line. That number is 888-225-5322.
Of course, with so much television content archived and streamed from the Internet, there is at least an element of the 2.8 million left behind households that likely won't miss terrestrial TV.
FCC chair Michael Copps, appointed on the eve of the originally scheduled February 17 DTV cutover, recently told a Los Angeles audience, "We've got some humps and bumps to navigate; there's still a number of people who don't know what to do. We knew this transition was coming, the government was late getting itself organized ... but we are where we are and have to make this transition."
Former Washington State Gov. Gary Locke, now Secretary of Commerce in the Obama administration, says its not all government's fault -- its ours. "There are so many people who are always waiting until the last minute, whether it is college students doing term papers, or people filing taxes, or people like me who wait until Christmas Eve to do their shopping."
South Dakota didn't procrastinate. They cut over according to the original time line. And according to state CIO Otto Doll (who also runs public broadcasting in the state) it worked -- and the demand for assistance from technical staff and a corps of volunteers was less than expected. When we talked last month, he noted that the nature of digital signals -- that they are there or they are not without the fade-in fade-out forgiveness of their analog predecessors -- caused some outlying residents in his largely rural state to lose TV reception. Doll is melancholy on this point, not so much for the loss of television signals per se but as another symptom of the marginalization (and depopulating) of frontier states.
The people whose TV sets became paper weights earlier this spring will have some company on Friday morning. Nielsen, the TV audience measurement company, estimates that 2.8 million households, or 2.5% of the TV market, will be left behind, despite the efforts of government, industry and community groups. Their efforts apparently did some good. Neilsen final estimate is less than half the 5.8 million TV household who that were unprepared in February.
For those who are still are not ready, the FCC has pressed 4,000 phone operators into service to stand by through the weekend to handle calls coming through their information line. That number is 888-225-5322.
Of course, with so much television content archived and streamed from the Internet, there is at least an element of the 2.8 million left behind households that likely won't miss terrestrial TV.
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