Delay the HDTV Rollout?

The other morning I was having breakfast / lunch with my friend and she asked what I thought about Obama suggesting that we delay the switch to all-digital programming. I told her I didn’t know anything about it and so I’d have to think about it a bit.

My initial reaction is that we’ve delayed the switch for too long anyway. It was supposed to happen several years ago. I suppose I’m not real empathetic to people being reluctant to change since I work in an industry where the technology changes every three months. Change or become obsolete.

It’s also not like people haven’t been aware of this for almost ten years. True that it’s only been in the last two or three years that people really had to start thinking about it, but that was still two or three years ago. Haven’t you had enough time to plan?

And what about all those TVs out there that won’t work. My question is, what about all those TV’s out there? How many of them are already connected to sat. or cable systems and should keep on working just fine? I haven’t seen any research indicating how many people will truly be without a TV once the cut is made. There also had to be a fair percentage of HDTVs out there that are already ready to go.

And of course, the govt. had the coupons available to those people who want to continue to user their analog TVs for over-the-air programming without having to upgrade. The coupon allowed you to go and get a converter box that would allow you to receive the new programming. The coupon covered about 75% of the cost of the boxes. Now the government is running out of money and there aren’t many coupons (if any) left.

I don’t recall what the govt. allocated for the coupons but it had to be fairly substantial and cover a butt-ton of converter boxes. So that is even more TVs that we don’t have to worry about.

My friend thinks that perhaps Obama is right and that perhaps right now is not the right time to force people to deal with it and / or make them spend money. I’m not sure I completely agree with that because as I’ve already stated, people had YEARS to deal with it.

But I can’t say that I really care one way or the other. If we delay it, it doesn’t really bother me too much. My only real concern is what we are supposed to tell all the companies that invested billions of dollars to purchase the air-space and have already begun investing developing product for the frequencies they purchased. Somehow it doesn’t quite seem right to tell them “sorry.”

I was thinking that perhaps a good compromise would be to find a little more money out of the proposed 900+ Million that Obama wants to spend on other projects and re-allocate some of it back into coupons so that people could still get the little converter boxes. I mean, if he is really that concerned about the problem it certainly seems that there might be other solutions.