Yesterday was supposed to be the Day Analog Died — after almost 30 years of wrangling over every imagin’head endable aspect of changing the American television broadcast standard from NTSC analog to high-definition digital, February 17, 2009 was the day the FCC had set for the discontinuation of analog over-the-air transmission. Given the lengthy lead-up time, there seemed to be little to forestall the switchover; over 124 million households in the U.S. are able to get cable television service (that’s virtually every household in the country) and the cable service providers had already been obliged to manage the signal conversion in their “head end” facilities so that people did not have to replace their televisions with digital sets, even though vast numbers of people had done so anyway. The over-the-air conversion would only apply to the small number of households without cable (or satellite) AND without a digital TV — no more than a couple of million by most estimates.
And yet the broadcast lobby and the big electronics manufacturers, some of whom also just happen to own television AND cable networks and service providers, managed to convince the incoming Obama Administration that they had screwed up their own efforts to get those last holdouts to obtain the necessary converter boxes, and so managed to buy SIX MORE MONTHS. Who knows for what reason, since it’s hard to imagine a single legitimate need on the broadcasters’ part, and since actually making the switchover would utterly compel people to get their converters or lose the ability to watch TV. But there you have it.
In fact, there were enough broadcasters ready to pull the switch yesterday that last week almost 500 television stations asked the FCC for permission to go ahead and do it anyway. Of those, the FCC gave the green light to over 360 stations. There are just over 1600 stations in the country, so that’s 22% of all the TV stations.’.
At Mother Jones today, writer Stephanie Mencimer says “Throw The Switch Already”, elaborating on the cost to the taxpayer of delaying the switchover for six more months (would you believe three-quarters of a billion dollars?!?!), and the politics-as-usual influence peddling involved in getting the Obama Administration to go along with something rather short of “change you can believe in.”
Last week it looked like Sirius-XM Satellite Radio was not going to make it. All the media news outlets were saying that the company, not even a full year into the merger of Sirius and XM, would have to file for bankruptcy and undergo some serious cuts to stay in business entirely. At the very last minute, though, Liberty Media agreed yesterday to a half-a-billion-dollar loan to keep Sirius-XM operational in return for a 40% equity stake in the company. That makes Liberty Media the controlling shareholder. It appears that Liberty Media really only stands to benefit by folding some of the programming into services offered by their DirectTV satellite business (i.e. radio channels bundled along with your television package) and selling off the rest. That is likely to happen pretty quickly, given the deteriorating situation at Sirius XM, so my bet is that within six months DirectTV will include the most-popular radio channels and everything else will be gone.
The EU has called for all cell phone makers to standardize on a single connector and charger to reduce the sheer volume of electronic gadget waste generated by having to replace all one’s chargers and other gear when moving from one cell phone to another. If you have even seen those photos of the tens of thousands of cell phones than end up in landfills each year , you should be able to appreciate the scope of the problem. Not surprisingly, the cell phone makers are pushing back with the easily anticipated response that there are too many different kinds of connectors, power requirements, and batteries to make such a thing feasible, to which the EU have countered with “not my problem”. For now, it is just a request and not a regulation, but the EU wastes a lot less time with these sorts of rules compared to the US. It’s pretty unlikely the US would get on board with this, either, since our government always does what’s best for businesses, and this would be seen as hurting the companies who make all this crap rather than as a step in the direction of reducing toxic waste. Le sigh.
