The Coming Swindle

Hey, did you know the politicians have ordered television broadcasters to turn off their analog broadcasts on February 17, 2009? That's the date your old television will stop pulling in free signals from the airwaves. Oh, you'll still be able to get free television programming.

Provided you pay a lot of money to switch over to new equipment.

Your old televisions will still work with cable and satellite for some unspecified period of time, but the broadcasts on the older analog channels will be gone. There will be a program to provide those who respond quickly enough with two $40 vouchers from the Federal government to help offset the cost of conversion. The money is very limited, however. And $40 (or even $80) doesn't even begin to address the costs involved.

We don't know when the vouchers will be available, but when they are, sign up right away — there may not be enough to go around. If the government is going to take away the TV broadcasts you've been perfectly happy with, it might as well pay part of the cost to keep your set alive.

The $40 vouchers are the heart of a $1.5 billion switch-over plan announced last week by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. This little-known agency has an unhappy job — taking the sting out of a forced change in household technology that will turn politically toxic once millions of viewers figure out they've been had.

As part of a deal hatched by politicians, broadcasters and TV makers in the mid-1990s, the nation's TV stations are abandoning the analog transmission system they've used for over-the-air broadcasts since the 1940s.

They're replacing it with a new and incompatible digital transmission scheme that will provide them with more channels, including the capacity for high-definition broadcasts. The change also will force consumers to spend billions on new TVs, converters, antennas and other gadgets.

Most local stations are broadcasting in both formats today. But Congress has told broadcasters to cease their analog transmissions on Feb. 17, 2009.

That politically convenient date is just after the Super Bowl, but far enough ahead of the NCAA basketball tournament that lawmakers can skip town before millions of fans start to realize that they can't get digital broadcasts in their neighborhoods.

As the author of the linked article says, the older analog bandwidth will be auctioned off to wireless operators for really important things. Like streaming pornography. Just some more reason to thank Washington for all its help. (And this is not partisan, by the way. The laws that mandated this happened to have been passed during the Clinton administration, but it took bi-partisan support to get passed. So you can indulge in completely guilt-free bashing of politicians in general!)