DTV Cutoff Officially Delayed

Shelley Wed, 02/04/2009 - 18:22
  • The Signals: DTV

Congress today voted to make the DTV transition even more confusing by pushing back the date given on every billboard and in every commercial an additional four months. The cut-off date is now June 12th...sort of.

According to a Washington Post story on the delay

The House today has voted to delay the nation's transition to digital television by four months, less than two weeks before broadcasters were scheduled to turn off traditional analog signals and air only digital programming Feb. 17.

An additional impact of the new legislation is that DTV conversion coupons that expired are now good again, for a limited time.

What all of this means is that the people who ignored all of the warnings and pleas for the last year, can now ignore another four months of the same. This also means that those of us who did what was necessary for the transition have to put up with the constant barrage of noise about the DTV switch for another four months.

What's worse, though, is that those stations ready to make the switch can switch, which will now result in a patchwork of cut-offs, rather than the one clean cut-off date for everyone.

Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael J. Cops said today that 143 broadcasters have already terminated their analog signals and another 60 stations plan to do so before Feb. 17. Other stations have told the agency they plan to shut off analog signals on the original transition date, but they may choose to remain on the air.

Except that it typically costs a station $10,000 a month to continue with both analog and digital signals at the same time. I think we'll find more than a few stations making the transition on the earlier, February 17th date.

Additional information at Broadcasting and Cable.

The Video Online Crap Shoot

Shelley Wed, 02/04/2009 - 13:00

The premise sounds good: rather than subscribe to a cable or other video service, access movies and television shows via the internet using either our computers, or specialized set top boxes.

I bought into the concept when early last year I purchased an AppleTV, followed up by purchases of not one but two Roku boxes: one for me, one for my roommate. After all, the cost of the equipment was more than compensated for by the savings I achieved by not subscribing to either the local cable service (Charter), or the newly available AT&T U-Verse.

We already had a subscription to Netflix, and the Watch Now capability delivered through the Roku boxes was, for a time, very satisfying. The service supplemented our access to local programming through indoor antenna and digital conversion boxes, and at a fraction of the cost of cable.

Then came the big change at Netflix: support for streaming HD movies and TV shows. Of course, some would say the HD quality isn't true HD, and the streams left something to be desired, but I found them to be excellent on my 720p television, as did my roommate on his older CRT-based TV.

However, when Roku started rolling out HD support to all Roku users, something started to go wrong. The first public releases of the beta software would cause the Roku boxes to spontaneously reboot. Later releases coincided with several people, who previously had reliable service, suffering stream and buffering issues, especially during peak media times, such as weekends and evenings. By the time that build 1.5 909 was released, both my roommate's and my boxes became unusable, with the constant, and extremely slow, rebuffering.

Though the Roku people have since released another build to try and address the issue of re-buffering, the problems associated with the service have not improved, leaving me to wonder whether I am now the proud possessor of two black bricks.