How many people does this digital conversion really affect? My god, with all of the commercials and air time that is dedicated to this stuff AD NAUSEUM, it’s really annoying.

Are the TV stations getting a big kickback or getting paid big $$ by the government to advertise and promote this stuff? With as much as we see on it, there has to be SOME incentive for them to talk it to death.

I think the law says all stations must make a ‘Herculean effort’ to inform all citizens of the upcoming change. Yet, there will still be many who never knew about the change and and won’t be ready. There are those who want Obama to delay the switchover a few months so we can ‘reach’ those individuals. The date has been advertised for a very long time and if you don’t know about it by now, you must not watch much TV so you won’t miss it!

I did the rescan, and KMOV is now MIA on my computer’s digital TV tuner. As far as that map on KMOV’s web site goes, I live in South St. Louis City.

Oh, and on top of that, my digital tuner guide (Titan TV) is now completely FUBAR. I’m having to go through the whole rescan process again.

I guess I won’t be watching much CBS programming until March, if then.

So because a small number of people “may” be affected, we still have to put up with KMOV’s annoying and intrusive five minute crawls every night for another two months because they obviously didn’t have their $#%@ together like everybody else? That figures!

The one individual is correct–it’s the RF pirates run-amok (the fcc) require these broadcasters to continually propagandize the public
that if they don’t take action they’re somehow at fault for this
debacle–that is, “you TV may not work”.

No, everyone’s televisions will continue to work just as well after
the deadline as before, it’s the broadcasting which will no longer be
working. As far as I’m concerned that ought to have been stressed more.

And while the rf pirates were requiring unfunded-mandated promotional
programs of their little thralls (the licensed services) they
might have wanted to mandate the broadcasters to broadcast the home addresses and private telephone numbers of the jokers most personally
responsible for forcing this non-backwards-compatible change down the
viewing publics’ throats.

Al Gore was more than happy to try to hijack the credit for what his
slithering-mate called “thuh infermayshun sooper hiway”. Where’s the
“Al ‘The Whore’ Gore” to step up and claim the credit for DTV?

I’m sure many of us would at-the-very-least like to send him or them
our most sincere thanks.

I don’t know how many or what percentage are affected by these
changes. I do know that’s it’s been a traditional principle in changing
major regulated services for the fcc to strive for backwards compatibility
in the changes. That’s why your FM radio can receive and play the full
content of the broadcasts of a station also supplying full stereo sound as well as possibly sub-carrier broadcast services to businesses.

That’s why you can take one of those ancient antique telephones which are vertical with the dial mechanism in the base–the old “candlestick”
style phone–and if you connect it correctly to your leased-line can dial out and talk on it even though we’ve long ago progressed to more sophisticated telephone instruments.

It’s why, when the change came from monochrome to color television broadcasting the owners of current and subsequent monochrome television
receivers were still able to get a perfectly usable picture containing all the pertinent image information.

But now my generation and their demon spawn have taken over the world and suddenly the only provision which can be made for the poor people in the Toffler Zone is to offer them some “voucher” like they’re refugees from another time for two “converters” (and they’re not–if they were actual converters you’d be able to tune on your old set or VCR. They’re EXTERNAL TUNERS). I see now that the broadcasters in their mandated informational promotional broadcasts are finally recognizing the fact that the early claim that if you could recieve a station’s analog broadcasts on your existing antenna you’d be able to use that antenna after the deadline were woefully over-optimistic and are stressing antenna changes more.

They couldn’t even get the most basic retro-campatibility right! (the government bureaucrap geniuses who forced this down our throats, that is).

Of course said voucher is good only on the purchase of the “converter” and is not applicable if the viewer instead only needs one converter and maybe the other $40 might be better applied to the purchase of antennas, pre-amps and requisite cabling–and forget any paid help in installation, you’re not touching that with the penurious pittance being allowed to those who made this whole issue/profitable industry possible in the first place…

The whole thing disgusts me.

They say if you want to know what’s really going on, just “follow the money”. Since the constant mantra in this whole thing is “if you subscribe to a for-pay television provider you don’t need to worry” I would have to wonder if the cable and direct satellite for-pay subscription providers didn’t lobby heavily for this change. I’d guess they probably would have thought they had a lot to gain here, and that many long-time hold-outs might finally throw up their hands in surrender and call the local cable company up to avoid this whole issue. After all, it’s socially acceptable to subscribe to a television provider service but an embarrassment to be unable to cope with some government mandated acquisition, installation connection and operation debacle which all the gold-plated experts all agree night after night after night on every possible outlet is “easy”…

In the past it would have been political suicide for the supposed representatives of The People to preside over a non-elected government bureaucracy-mandated-change which would overnight render millions of dollars worth of privately owned type-accepted consumer electronics gear non-functional.

Well, Gates and his friends the “thou shalt upgrade or lose service” people in their almost totally unregulated sca-er, I mean “industry” have set the bar as low as it goes and have beaten the poor long-suffering mere mortal consumer over the head one too many times with their memory sticks and now they’re conditioned to accept just about any outrage so long as it has some form of embedded processor in it.

Then Colossus decides all the unreliable wet-ware units are superfluous anyway, and we are deleted.

The End