DTV came, saw and conquered; was it good for you?
Changeover day came and went this past Friday and while the vast majority of the country likely didn’t even notice, a handful of people were in for a rude awakening as analog broadcasts ended. Over the past week, the FCC’s official help line received about 700,000 calls — 347,450 on Friday alone — regarding issues leading up to and following the changeover. About a third of Friday’s calls were from people still looking for coupons to help pay for digital converter boxes and another third were from people having trouble operating their converters. About 20 percent of the calls were regarding reception issues. Michael Copps, acting FCC Chairman, had this to say regarding the tidal wave of calls:
Our job is far from over. This transition is not a one-day affair. We have known about re-scanning and reception issues for some time and have been doing our best to get the word out.
Re-scanning, as Copps mentioned, is said to resolve reception issues a great deal of the time. So, if Grandma decides to call you for tech support rather than dialing up 1-888-CALL-FCC, that should likely be the first stop on the troubleshooting train. As for BGR readers, we imagine most if not all of you have already been enjoying some kind of digital broadcast for years now. There are always a few stragglers though — anyone caught with their pants down this past Friday? Figuratively, that is.
I can only imagine the hell those helps lines have to go through.
why are they slow?
it’s been 3 years for preparation
My wife can’t listen to her soaps on her Walkman that picked up TV reception before the change…
The only problem I know of is my spouse can’t listen to the local news on the car radio as that TV station can no longer be picked up.
There, there, American. Now, was that so hard? Couldn’t we just have done all this a few months ago?
One thing that a few friends have noticed that went virtually unmentioned during all the ramp up was that a good portion of those newfangled “HDTV” antennas were UHF only. A lot of major market broadcast stations switched their digital frequencies over to VHF at the on June 12. You could have a brand new top of the line digital HDTV, a $200 long-range multi-directional antenna professionally mounted and be SOL if your stations moved to VHF. For example, both the ABC and CBS affiliates in Washington DC did just this, now thousands who thought they were prepared can’t get 7 and 9 here. There’s no govt coupon for replacing and reinstalling a new antenna!
I hated it. I had so many people pissed off that Comcast lied to them and they had to get converters. I whole blame Comcast for misleading customers into thinking they were fine when in fact they were not.
Oh, the DTV transition happened? I completely forgot about it and didn’t even notice. They delay was pointless and a waste of money.
@rodt: When did Comcast lie and tell everyone to get converters? I’m not backing up Comcast here, but every commercial I saw was “IF YOU HAVE COMCAST, YOU DO NOT, I REPEAT, YOU DO NOT NEED A DTV CONVERTER”. They plastered them all over the TV.
Now if you mean a Comcast digital cable box, yeah they have been know to slam customers into getting digital when they didn’t need it. However, that’s all about to change anyway because in my area Comcast went entirely digital to free up bandwidth for more HD channels. So you need a cable box or cable card in my area.