On the DTV transition as an IT project

[dsrtao]

We were all supposed to have digital television by now, but it got delayed.

That was in 2006. Now it's 2008, and Congress voted to delay it a little more, from just after the Super Bowl to June 12.

(If you use cable or satellite television, nothing is changing anyway, except that your service provider will continue to act like jerks. OK, nothing at all.)

I'm OK with the delay. The people who will be most affected by the change are those least able to cope with it: people who do not pay for cable or satellite TV services, and especially those who live in rural areas far from TV station antennae. The next few months will let Congress re-fund the coupons for DTV converter boxes, distribute them properly, and settle the confusion. Frankly, the FCC ought to put an ad in during the Super Bowl.

An oft-repeated but nevertheless believable statistic is that 70% of all major IT projects are failures. The DTV transition is an IT project -- a big, multiyear (since 1997ish), multicompany project with barely any sense of ownership or direction. The technical standards were set years ago. TV stations have been ready for months to years. And somehow, everyone assumed that the end-users were going to be self-educating.

Comments

Good points

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

...and barely any funding at the user end.

Re: Good points

[dsrtao]

Digital television set ownership has increased significantly over the last two years. At the beginning of 2006, owning any sort of natively digital television was an upper-middle-class signifier. By the middle of this year, a significant majority of households who own any TVs will have at least one digital set; a 19" 720P LCD costs roughly the same $200 a 20" standard-definition CRT did in 2006.

Moore's Law (and associates) made up for a lot of the end-user money. Not all of it, of course.

Re: Good points

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

But as in your post, those without a digital TV will (mostly) be those least able to cope with it -- people who can't afford a new TV, or satellite or cable.

We have an 8 year old TV with no plans to replace it until it fails, but we could if we needed to.

Re: Good points

[dsrtao]

Sure. And in the meantime, you've also discovered NetFlix on-demand is affordable and useful to you. Technology marches onwards.

A $40 (presumably -$40 coupon) converter box plus a roof-mounted antenna ought to get you every major network OTA. I did a quick search at antennaweb.org versus the zip code of your town library. Now, if only the funding is re-opened...

Re: Good points

[(Anonymous)]

..and also be an annoyance to those of us cable-users who got rid of the converter boxes years ago & saved ourselves some $$ ;-)

One question I haven't seen come up much, though, is "Why are we doing this?" apart from sealing our tv broadcasts from any listening extraterrestrials.

Re: Good points

[dsrtao]

The real reason is that cellphone and wireless data service corporations want the television broadcast spectrum.

Re: Good points

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Well, sorta. We're ok, because we have the cheapie cable plan ($10, I think) but Metageek got a box just in case and tried it out. With rabbit ears, I think we got one channel, but it might have been nothing. A quick google indicates that a proper roof antenna is in the neighborhood of $100.

Netflix is great, yep. Metageek is pondering how best to get it to the TV without paying for the little appliance thingy -- the best computer to get it to (mine) is 50 feet from the TV.

Re: Good points

[dsrtao]

50 feet. Hrm. What kind of video output from your computer? S-Video? RCA-composite?

Re: Good points

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

I'll send Metageek over here, but I believe the main issue is that the TV itself does not have a computer-in port, and all the ports are occupied. I think he said he might be able to run it into the video player, but it would still be a lot of cable, and nobody wants to run cable in the crawl space again.

Re: Good points

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Just DVI, I think. (I tried to get behind the computer to check, but that proved impractical. But Googling the Mac Pro specs seems to say just DVI.) An adapter to S-Video and RCA would be $20.

The other problem, of course, is that the screen would be 50 feet from the mouse, so we wouldn't be able to control the playback. My current favorite option is to see whether the Netflix program will play nice with VNC; if so, I can resurrect a certain Linux box which does have S-Video out. (There is an Ethernet cable in the room with the TV.)

[robertdfeinman.livejournal.com]

Digital reception on my local PBS station is much worse than the analog version. I think this may be due to the fact that the digital signal is being carried on a high channel UHF station until after the switch over when the digital signal will revert to the VHF frequency.

It also seems that once analog is turned off the existing stations will be allowed to boost the power on the digital version of their signals. So the delay is only adding to the confusion since many who have switched to broadcast digital are having reception problems which may go away later.

They also screwed up the issue of repeaters for rural areas which will remain analog.

I think the main idea was to push people towards buying new sets and switching to cable. That's what happened in my case. although I bought the new TV when the old one conked out.

[thesaucernews.livejournal.com]

At the station where I work, we've been running as many ads for the transition as possible. We've done news stories about it, demonstrating the process of buying, installing and configuring a converter box and a dtv set. We even had a phone-in segment call us and we will explain it to you.. As much as I feel for people still either unaware of the change or unable to get a new set, I don't think a delay is going to help. A few people are going to get freaked out when they lose their picture, sure. And then they'll either buy a new tv or they won't have a picture for a while. I'm sure less than half a dozen cars get toppled by rioting mobs and set on fire, tops.

Even after the transition, you've still got the cable users who never noticed a problem and, so, never upgraded their sets. There's only so much to be done in making a clean transition -- the transit itself can serve as the educational tool.