IBM Profits From Government Greed
(what makes this news to the home theater crowd is that many home theater owners still don’t know this is happening - many already have the ability to make the change - but are still unaware of when it will happen, or why. The why is that the government felt the need to sell off the spectrum and upset things as they were, with a subterfuge about national emergency spectrum needs. Most don’t understand that if the emergency channel was a digital broadcast, it could be placed in unallocated space available now, making the change superfluous. The need was negligible, the desire for profit was huge.)
In a move that tends to show the government, specifically the FCC, is worried about the public response to the end of analog broadcast television, on February 17, 2009, an award of 119.9 million dollars has been given to IBM.
Much of the effort to stem the ire of the masses will be put towards the distribution of the $40 coupons, 2 available to each household, to help defray the cost of the converter boxes to allow reception of broadcast television when analog broadcasting goes ‘dark’. (As usual, the government put little thought into whether this will simply allow the set top box makers to commensurately up the price.)
The money will be otherwise used for a massive educational effort, so that ‘Joe Average’ won’t think the Apocalypse has come while he was sleeping on February 16.
The funny thing is - when did IBM get to be a public relations firm?
October 13th, 2007 at 5:49 pm
[...] tells me that market penetration of HDTV is still small, and possibly many are thinking about the upcoming deadline for analog television transmission in these United [...]
October 20th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
[...] company also announced that they will participate in the NTIA DTV Converter Box Coupon Program to help people purchase digital converter boxes for their analog televisions. Coupon-eligible [...]
May 27th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
[...] are so many problems here that the money once allocated to ’sell’ this idea to the masses, may not be enough - especially when those problems start cropping [...]