I was doing some quick web surfing yesterday when I ran across this article in the Washington Examiner.
I’m reading the first two paragraphs, thinking “politics as usual, blah, blah…”
But the third paragraph got my attention: “By pushing to delay the long-scheduled transition of television broadcasting from analog signals to digital signals, president-elect (now president, kc) Obama is directly aiding Sprint and its partner Clearwire while hurting Verizon.”
Again, to be clear, I’m not referring to alleged political alliances and etc.(so don’t go getting all partisan on me); rather, that there could be a delay in shutting off analog television broadcast as of February 17, 2009, the long-scheduled date.
Interesting… That “huge swath of frequencies” referred to later in the article may not be freed up quite so soon.
So I sent a note to a friend of mine who follows these types of things much more closely, and here’s what he had to say about it.
All I’ve heard is that there are efforts to delay the switch-off of analog TV broadcasts. Seems that there are those aiming for June instead of February.
My guess is that is is more due to pressure from the networks due to pressure from advertisers. The fact is that a fairly significant portion of TV viewers are not ready for analog TV to be shut off. Maybe 20 – 40% of households are not ready, and that’s a LOT of potential advertising viewers.
But this whole thing is certainly giving a boost to cable. Overall it may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in terms of killing off broadcast TV.
I leave you with this from the last paragraph of the article: “Almost unanimously, Capitol Hill staff and industry sources this week expressed certainly that Obama would get his way, meaning the long-scheduled transition would be delayed.”
For what it’s worth…