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Hernando Today

Entering The Digital Age

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Hernando Today

Published: February 25, 2009

The new powers that be in Washington, D.C., can, after all, make a decision that has nothing to do with Guantanamo Bay, the war on terror or the nose-diving world economy. Not even your April tax return.

The ruling, instead, postpones the nationwide transition to digital TV June 12.

Life as dictated by Washington was never meant to be simple. Some TV stations went ahead and switched to digital on the original target date — including a few in the Tampa Bay area. Sounds confusing. My advice is to watch this space — and the next one and the next one…

Big Government has considered the needs of the approximately seven million households (including 63,000 in the Tampa Bay region) that will lose current analog TV signals (courtesy of your old rabbit-ears antenna) by June. But they've at least partly missed the boat—again.

The feds created a messy situation out of a pleasant thought when funds and coupons for simple converter boxes ran out, leaving those 7 million households around the country high and dry.

How much does cable really pay attention to seniors who rely on old rabbit ears for their news, weather and weekly soaps? Their steam-engine TVs are not a luxury, they're a necessity. Lawmakers should have considered that angle.

Nielsen, the TV rating company, estimates that bleary-eyed seniors watch up to 200 hours of TV a month. Those $25 million earmarked for digital promotional expenses can't be expected to have covered all that much ground. Not when many non-converted TVs are way out in the hills or sticks where cable may, eventually, be drawn in some day.

It doesn't make sense, either, that the feds had printed up a 90-day expiration date on the converter coupons and then mailed them out to consumers via pony express third-class mail.

A spot of irony: Some of the $25 million was used to sponsor a NASCAR rig. Interesting target audience, you'd think. But, the feds' NASCAR crashed on its first run. Didn't get much bang from those advertising bucks.

When it was time to have a $1-a-month converter box installed, I rang up Bright House, (guess you'd at least "zap" them today), Hernando County's main cable provider. I quickly forgot lesson No. 1: Always double-check the price! I have wound up paying, not $1, but$15 a month, plus tax, for my converter. There's something cockeyed with this picture.

Trying to use my converter again after the first dozen successful switches, the box was now officially broken. I called Bright House, just like the direction book said. A friendly sales voice could have cared less about my problem. She tried to sell me on a total super-duper fiber-optic doo-hicky, instead.

After I squeezed a word in edgewise that I was only calling fora repair job, she went click-click-click in the background and proudly announced "Now you're all set." I had been remotely reprogrammed. I don't know what kind of black magic they pull out of a hat in their Brooksville office (or maybe it was in India?), but Bright House can be downright effective — for a price.

Bright House reports few complaints about the converter boxes. That's life in a hermetically sealed monopoly. Hear no evil, see no evil. But, it doesn't quite agree with the Tampa Trib's recent tests of converter boxes. Four of six were more or less condemned outright.

My rabbit ears are twitching — should I be paying $1or $15 a month for a basic converter box?

Congress has been tampering with the all-digital idea for about a decade. The loss of so many first responders on 9/11 sped up the opening of more broadcast channels to two-way radio bands.The stingy old analog system was doomed way back then.

It hasn't been feasible to maintain both analog and digital TV systems — too expensive and too much in new hardware, plus extra electricity. Don't worry; the consumer will be stuck with four months of analog add-ons, no matter what. Cable will find a way.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

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