Congress Lends a Digital TV Transition Hand

America, are we all still up-in-arms about the digital TV transition? Looks like it. First the government said that to keep up with the times people needed to get rid of their analog, rabbit ear TVs for a digital one leading Congress to pass a budget of $1.34 billion to give out coupons for those who wanted assistance in buying converters to convert the signal if a new TV was not in the constituents future.

 

Then the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the arm of the Commerce Department said, "Umm, we're out of money," leading to a wide-spread panic (maybe not so wide) of people not knowing what to do. Fast forward a bit, Obama becomes president, one of his fixer-uppers is this digital cable fiasco so he says, "Uh, what we need to do is, uh, delay it."

 

Up to speed? Excellent, now moving on to this week. According to the Associated Press, "the House voted 264-158 on Wednesday to postpone the shutdown of analog TV signals to June 12, to address growing concerns that too many Americans won't be ready by the Feb. 17 deadline that Congress set three years ago. The Senate passed the measure unanimously last week and the bill now heads to President Barack Obama for his signature."

 

Three years ago? America, what is going on? Why are we unable to switch frequencies? The Bush-Obama transition seemed flawless, can't we just fake it like they did?

 

White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said in a statement, "The passage of this bipartisan legislation means that millions of Americans will have the time they need to prepare for the conversion."

 

Wednesday's vote came one week after House Republicans blocked the bill (questions answered) under a special fast-track procedure that required two-thirds support to pass. This time, the bill passed the House under a regular floor vote, which requires a simple majority.

 

Among Democrats, 241 voted for the bill, while 10 voted against it. Among Republicans, 23 voted for the bill, while 148 voted against it.

 

"It is unfortunate that Congress had to take additional action on this issue, but the prospect of leaving millions of consumers in the dark was simply unacceptable," subcommittee member Edward Markey, D-Mass., added.

 

However, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn seems to have her TVs good to go saying, "It's time for us to move forward on this and keep our word to the American people," calling for the transition to proceed on Feb. 17.

 

The Consumer Electronics Association, meanwhile, is warning that a delay could result in a shortage of converter boxes, which the NTIA has more than 3.7 million coupon requests on a waiting list.

 

Democrats on Capitol Hill and at the FCC have also questioned whether the government has provided enough on-the-ground support to help consumers hook up converter boxes -- or whether enough call center resources have been arranged to handle what could be an avalanche of requests for help.

 

"The country is not prepared to undertake a nationwide transition in 11 days without unacceptably high consumer dislocation," acting FCC chairman Michael Copps said in a statement. "We've got a lot of work to do, but we now have an opportunity to do it better."

 

Government, can we learn from this and do it right the first time. We're talking about TVs for goodness sakes.