“Public Television”

No--It’s not what you think...

Isn't it amazing how the government's 20th century discovery of its "ownership" of the radio frequency spectrum continues to cause so many problems? Legislation begets legislation, taxes beget taxes, and even when there aren’t any real problems it seems like the government goes out of their way to create issues so they can solve them, usually by—you guessed it—raising taxes.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was formed in 1934 and the first thing they did was start issuing broadcast licenses. Of course we were to believe the regulation was for “our own good.” They wanted to ensure the orderly use of the AM radio transmissions in the early 1900’s. This sorta made sense because in theory they didn’t want one radio station to interfere with the signal of an adjacent station. So good, so far.

Back in the early days of radio when there were only a few dozen stations, the fledgling FCC probably didn’t have much to do except for sitting around scratching their unmentionable body parts. You can, however, thank the FCC for doing important things like creating the ATT telephone monopoly that existed for years and instituting the one cable company per city cable TV monopolies that we still all enjoy today.

The FCC also mandates that every radio station and TV station use some of THEIR MONEY to provide some level of nebulus “public service” to the community. I guess that things like broadcasting the Emergency Broadcast Announcements and providing free commercial air time to certain politically correct groups comes under this heading.

Then there is that outdated, useless bastion of liberal drivel—the Public Broadcast System. Don’t Eeeeeeven get me started…

So anyway, it wasn’t long before things in the broadcast business started changing.

When FM radio and TV came along, the government continued to employ the practice of selling the frequencies to station operators through the use of a “licensing fee.” Of course back then a 10,000 watt transmitter was the size of a small house and cost a tidy fortune to own and operate, so broadcasters were still few and far between and the availability of frequencies still wasn’t much of an issue.

A distance of tens of miles between transmitters and receivers has been reduced to tens of feet today, however. In our household alone we have two cellular phones, two portable phones, two TV’s, three AM/FM radios, two radio controlled model cars, and a wireless computer network. Every one of these devices operates on a different piece of the electronic spectrum, and all of the signals are analog.

The bad news is that with analog signals there is a certain amount of “signal spread” and noise that goes along with the transmission of the signal that can interfere with adjacent signal frequencies. For this reason, the output power of the transmitters is limited by law and the analog frequencies have to be spaced a certain distance apart to prevent bleed-over and other forms of interference. Each individual user also has to be aware of their own frequency mix in order to not suffer from a bad case of self induced electronic gobblygook with their toys and appliances.

Now along comes the “digital TV revolution,” something highly touted by the TV industry and sanctioned by the government. They’ve already started doing limited broadcasting of digital signals and in 2009 they plan on ending all analog TV broadcasts in favor of digital.

The advantage of digital broadcasts is that they can contain more data than analog and the digital signals can be packed closer together than analog signals. This means that you can get maybe a thousand different digital signals in the same frequency space occupied by only a few dozen analog signals. The bad news is that after 2009 your old analog TV will be little more than an oversized paperweight or end table unless you have a digital converter box.

Enter our old friends, THE GOVERNMENT.

In their rush to convert to digital and resell the analog frequencies for even more cash, the government wants to speed up the conversion process by two years, thereby speeding up the necessity for set owners to make the conversion from analog to digital. Of course the government can fix this new problem they’re creating, but they need $3 BILLION of our tax money to solve it.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Lawmakers want to spend $3 billion to make sure millions of Americans won't wake up to blank TV screens when the country makes the switch to all-digital broadcasts.

The subsidy was approved Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee as part of legislation that would set April 7, 2009, as the firm date for television broadcasters to end their traditional analog transmissions and send their broadcasts via digital signals.

Digital television promises sharper pictures and better sound than analog TV. But millions of Americans with older TV sets rely solely on free, over the-air-television, and they'll need some type of a converter box to keep receiving their television service. Cable and satellite customers won't be affected.

Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said Congress needs to do something to help consumers with the older analog sets, an estimated 21 million households. "If we're mandating this (digital) conversion, we cannot leave people behind because they can't afford" digital television sets, he said.

The subsidy program would be paid for by money raised from the auction of the analog spectrum the broadcasters are vacating. The subsidy would be available for all those households with older televisions, and it would pay for converter boxes for all the TVs in a particular household, regardless of financial status.

Stevens estimates that the converter boxes would cost about $50. His plan would call for the government to pay roughly $40, and the consumer would make a co-payment of $10.

(Math Check: 21 million households x $40 = $840 million. Where do they get their $3 BILLION figure? Apparently they're planning on handing out subsidy's for 3.5 TV's per household.)

What appears to be driving this issue is industry’s supposed "need" for additional frequencies for use by police departments and other “first responders” and the government’s greed to resell the old analog TV frequencies to them for a tidy profit. Of course they can't just put the money into the budget and lower our tax burden. Instead they have to convert it into another cash giveaway welfare program.

Don’t misunderstand them here—they’re not talking about High Definition TV (HDTV)—they’re talking digital TV. High Definition TV requires a digital signal, but all digital TV’s won’t be high definition. And while the digital television signal can produce “sharper pictures and better sound” on a new digital or high definition TV, don’t expect the government provided converter box to make your old 1975 model 19” Sears Television set to suddenly start producing crisp, sharp pictures with Dolby surround sound, because it won’t.

If you have a crappy TV before the conversion, then all you will have after the digital conversion will be a crappy TV with another converter box sitting on top. Now it’s just a matter of who pays for the converter box, and as usual the government thinks that we’re too stupid or too poor to take care of ourselves.

I say let the industry and the market decide what people want and when they want it. Why didn’t the government go out and buy everyone a cassette player when cassettes became popular in the 1970’s? Why didn’t they then replace everyone’s cassette and record players when CD players took over the music industry? Or what about starting a government program to provide consumers with DVD players to replace their VCR because you can hardly find a video tape to rent down at Blockbuster?

What’s the difference here?

I suspect that if the government had interjected themselves into the recording industry like they have the broadcast business that we’d still be enjoying songs on vinyl records and listening to the lovely “clunk” of the track change on an 8 track player. Instead, the government by and large stayed the hell out of the record business and as a result we’ve seen gigantic improvements in the quality of the audio sound we listen to in our cars and homes. Due to normal market conditions, they’re practically giving away DVD players today. Imagine how much they’d cost if the FCC had been involved?

I personally have avoided buying anything digital or “high definition.” Instead we enjoy a nice 36” flat screen TV that’s a number of years old and we’ll use it until it dies because I think that the digital and high definition standards are still a little shaky. A lot of people are buying TV’s purported to be able to be upgraded to “high definition” in the future, only to find out that the conversion costs almost as much as a new TV.

You see, I’m aware of the coming digital conversion and I’m PLANNING to avoid getting caught with a bunch of year old analog TV’s when the change occurs. I am also afraid that in our consumer culture that many more people will own digital TV’s by the cutoff date of analog TV than the government estimates, and as a result the demand for converters will be insignificant and the price will be astronomical as a result.

The other thing that bothers me about this plan is that the government probably won’t be able to resist making the program “progressive.” Just like taxes, they’ll probably put an income limitation on the subsidy causing “wealthy” TV owners to receive less than “working families” and “the poor.” I bet that they make it like the earned income credit and pay the cash to everyone under a certain income level, regardless of whether the individual has an analog TV or not. Maybe they’ll decide that it isn’t fair that “the poor” don’t have a TV in every room and start handing out new digital TV's.

I sorta want to take a "tough shit" attitude toward people that expect the government to ensure their constitutional right to watch TV in their kitchen and bathroom. If you're walking around in $200 sneakers and a "starter jersey," endlessly talking on a cellphone, I believe that you can buy your own digital TV.

You've got four years notice...

(Hat Tip to the lovely propriator of Capital Freedom for the link to this story.)