Digital D-Day: ’9-1-1, What’s Your Programming Emergency?’

posted at 8:28 am on June 12, 2009 by dougpowers
[ Culture ]    printer-friendly

As I write this, there’s a crawl running across the television screen warning viewers that in a few hours, the analog signal will go away and the digital signal will be the only way to view the station.

There’s a “re-scan” advisory, and also this note: If you lose your television signal, do not call 9-1-1!

I’m conservative and libertarian on many issues, and as such am against government intervention, but anybody who calls 9-1-1 because they lost their TV signal should have to spend five years in prison listening to Roseanne Barr sing the National Anthem.

That’s right — there’s a legitimate fear that you could be laying in a pool of blood in an alley somewhere and that when you dial 9-1-1 you might get a “busy” signal because some mentally challenged recliner jockey can’t see The Price is Right.

The “digital transition” is such a simple undertaking: If you get your television reception over-the-air –in other words “there’s no wire going into your TV” (not counting the power cord, Forrest), you need a converter box or you won’t be able to watch TV after the conversion. That this has been a multi billion-dollar concept for so many registered voters to grasp goes a long way in explaining how we ended up with the government we have.

The FCC has spent too much money (from their expansive “lowest common denominator” budget that is funded by you and me) on people who can’t or won’t find the time to get a converter box, and this “problem” could have been solved cheaply by utilizing the scientific principle known as “The Couch Potato Law of Motion”: An object at rest will remain at rest until it no longer gets television reception.

Luckily there was not another delay, so serious inconveniences like the one seen in the below PSA can be avoided.

Blowback