It’s been years since the all-mighty, all-powerful U.S. government decreed that over-the-air analog television transmissions were to cease and henceforth all signals transmitted must be that of a digital ATSC format!

That was way back in 2005 when (according to Wikipedia) the Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 was passed. And while we’ve been hearing about this transition for a while now (some countries have completed it already) it is only in recent months that the public awareness campaign has really picked up. My local tv stations have had PSA after PSA after PSA airing for months now, all targeting February 17 as the date of the changeover. But apparently there’s enough folks out there who either aren’t ready for the change or still don’t know about it. Come on … if you don’t know by now that this transition is (was) happening then you don’t watch television. If you don’t watch television then this doesn’t apply to you anyway!

But the government was wanting to move the transition date back again, this time to June 12. The delay was voted through the Senate. Today it’s being reported that the House has voted and that vote failed to reach the majority that it needed for passing. So I guess that means that this move is still on for February 17 despite the 6.5 million Americans who aren’t ready.

It probably sounds kind of harsh to say that they need to let this transition happen, stragglers be damned. At this point in the game it stands to reason that most of the folks who aren’t either aware of the change or ready for the change are the elderly or the lazy. Okay, there’s those expired voucher coupons but more on that in a few sentences. It’s hard to believe that anyone has watched television over the last 6 months and has not been presented with a PSAs and commercials and announcements and discussions that this is going to happen. To keep coddling people is going to turn the DTV transition into yet another government entitlement program! If you wake up the day after the changeover happens and have no tv then you are going to figure out what is wrong if you want to watch tv. In my mind it will be the elderly who will fall victim to this more than any other class since they might not have a friend or family member who they can call to help. But if that’s the case then no amount of discussion or advertising is going to help them get the proper equipment so they don’t lose their signal. Maybe this post can be a call to those who have elderly family, friends or neighbors to check in and see if they will need help to keep their television working when the transition finally happens.

And then there is the case of the expired subsidy coupons that the government has been handing out to those who request them. Let’s forget about the fact that there aren’t enough to go around for just a moment. And the fact that the whole program ran out of money on January 5. That’s just more of the same non-efficient government working the way they work and no delay will fix that. Now I haven’t seen one of these coupons myself but from the look of them they are pretty high tech:

Couldn’t the powers-that-be have found a way to issue a coupon that doesn’t ever expire but rather can only be used once?  From what I understand each coupon has a unique identifying number so once a coupon is redeemed that would then make that single number invalid to be used again. It should work like an iTunes gift cards. If Apple can make that kind of thing work why can’t the federal government?