House votes to delay digital TV transition to June 12

Congress this afternoon granted a four-month reprieve to the millions of consumers who are at risk of losing access to TV signals during the switch from over-the-air television to digital broadcasting.

In a 264-158 vote, the House of Representatives approved a bill to push the transition to June 12 from Feb. 17. President Obama has promised to sign the legislation, which passed the Senate last week. The law will require TV stations to keep broadcasting their analog signals until June 12. Consumer advocates say that as many as 10 million viewers currently get their programming solely from over-the-air broadcasts and are unprepared for the digital transition.

"Consumers are confused about where to buy their converter box, about which box to buy, how to hook up their box, what to do if they lose a channel they once got and whether they need a new antenna," said Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst with Consumers Union. "Changing the date allows them more time to grapple with those questions."

But the delay also could make the confusing transition even more perplexing for some viewers.

TV stations are allowed to seek federal approval to turn off their analog signals before the new deadline. So instead of nearly all broadcasters making the switch on Feb. 17, stations now may ...

U.S. House delays digital TV delay, but stay tuned

Dire reports are out today declaring the death of attempts by the new government to delay next month's nationwide switch to digital TV. The House failed to pass a bill that would postpone the switch from Feb. 17 to June 12.

The Washington Post calls that "a setback for the Obama administration", as does the Associated Press, which says the bill was defeated.

But don't read too much into the move. Supporters of the delay still expect it to pass as soon as next week.

The measure, which the Senate approved Monday, needed a two-thirds majority to pass the House on an expedited basis. Strong Republican opposition prevented the fast-tracking. But normal rules require only a simple majority, and the bill received that and more. The House vote was 258-168 in favor of a delay.

Rep. Rick Boucher, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the House telecommunications subcommittee, told me he was optimistic the chamber would agree to President Obama's request and vote to put off the digital transition until June so about 6.5 million viewers won't lose their TV signals next month.

“The likelihood is we’ll come back next week” and pass it, he said.

A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat, said she was looking for a way to hold the vote soon.

-- Jim Puzzanghera

Photo credit: Valerie Everett via Flickr

Digital TV transition closer to four-month delay after Senate vote

Hold onto your rabbit ears: People unprepared for the nation's digital TV transition may get a four-month reprieve.

The Senate today voted unanimously to delay the transition to all-digital broadcasts, originally scheduled for Feb. 17, until June 12. If the measure passes the House, homes that get TV the old-fashioned way -- over the air -- will have extra time to get ready.

A delay would give the Obama administration the extra time it has been requesting to whip the converter-box program into shape. The program gave $40 coupons for the special converter boxes needed to make digital signals work with their analog TV sets, but it ran out of money early this month, and the waiting list has been growing. Reuters says:

Many lawmakers worry that an estimated 20 million mostly poor, elderly and rural households are not ready for the switch, which requires owners of older television sets receiving over-the-air signals to buy a converter box or subscribe to cable or satellite TV.

The intention of the digital-TV transition is to deliver clearer over-the-air pictures and free up valuable spectrum for public safety officials' communication systems. Critics of a delay say the nation has received ample warning about the transition and that the nation should flip the switch already, as Hawaii and Wilmington, N.C., have.

It's hard not to laugh about this all when you watch the spoof public service announcement, above, from the "Talkshow With Spike Feresten." But it's also hard not to think about the trouble that grannies all over the country may face as they try to make sense of this whole mess.

-- Chris Gaither

CES: Sneakerware 2009, Part 1

LAS VEGAS -- Despite all the buzz at last week's Consumer Electronics Show about the connected home, some companies still believe the average consumer isn't ready for a world of DLNA, UPnP and MoCA. Just typing those acronyms makes me think they're right. Anyway, there were a couple of sneakerware-based offerings that caught my eye, one of which was from disk-drive-manufacturer Seagate.

Seagate has been pitching its FreeAgent external hard drives to consumers in sort of an eat-your-vegetables way, arguing that they need to back up their photos, music and other digital media in case their PCs fail. How ... compelling. To sweeten the deal, it plans to offer a $129 docking station next month called the FreeAgent Theater that will let users display the contents of their external (or USB) drives on their big-screen TVs. I saw a demo of the device at CES and was impressed by how easy it was to find media stored on a drive, play it and do simple productions, such as digital-photo slideshows with music. One caveat: The picture quality varied with the source material, with high-definition files looking very good on the big screen, the lower-resolution files less so....

CNN hoping Obama inauguration is Web's 'most watched event ever'

CNN and Facebook announced today that Web watchers could enjoy Barack Obama's inauguration interactively with a talky-chatty Web TV doohicky the two companies developed together. The application will be running at cnn.com/live and will allow Facebookers to see what their friends are saying about the proceedings. The festivities will begin at 7 a.m. Pacific time -- just when most of us out here are blearily checking Facebook to see whether we got any overnight wall posts.

CNN.com President KC Estenson told MediaWeek that despite the early start time, CNN and Facebook had high hopes. "We're building the technical infrastructure for the possibility that this may be the most watched event ever on the Internet."

It'd be nice if Estenson pointed to the current online viewership record, but he didn't, so ... I'm not quite sure what it is. A long time ago in 2007 the Live Earth concert brought in 237,000 simultaneous viewers. It would seem that a 15-month-old number like that shouldn't be hard to beat, considering the visibility of the event. It's also possible that the record was set during the 2008 Beijing Olympics (NBC's online distributor Limelight expected it to be), but NBC never gave out simultaneous-viewing numbers. We just know, for instance, that NBC.com served 13.5 million video streams in the first four days of the Olympics -- meaning an average of 3.3M streams per day, or about 140,000 an hour. 

Inexact calculations to be sure, but they offer a sense that in terms of simultaneous viewing, cracking the 1 million barrier almost certainly hasn't been done yet, and even 500,000 is probably still a milestone. 

We'll follow up with CNN after the event to see whether they've released the numbers.

-- David Sarno

Obama asks Congress to delay digital TV switch*

President-elect Barack Obama today asked Congress to delay next month’s planned switch to all-digital broadcast television, warning that the TVs of millions of Americans could lose their pictures because of major problems in the government's preparations.

In a letter to Congressional leaders (PDF), John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s presidential transition team, urged that the Feb. 17 conversion date be extended. A major reason was the announcement this week by the Commerce Department that it had run out of money for a government program to provide $40 coupons for low-cost converter boxes to allow older TVs to receive the new digital signal. But Podesta also cited problems with the government’s effort to educate the public about the switch and help prepare people, particularly the elderly, poor and those living in rural areas.

"With coupons unavailable, support and education insufficient and the most vulnerable Americans exposed, I urge you to consider a change to the legislatively mandated analog cutoff date,” Podesta wrote to the chairmen and top Republicans on the Senate Commerce committee and the House Energy and Commerce committee.

According to the Nielsen Co., about 6.8% of U.S. TV households, or 7.7 million homes, were unprepared for the digital switch as of last month, meaning they had no TVs capable of receiving a digital signal. The percentage is higher in Los Angeles, with 9.46%, or about 535,000 homes unprepared for the switch.

The digital TV transition is being hailed as broadcast television's most dramatic upgrade since it bloomed to color from black and white half a century ago. The technology gives free viewers vastly sharper pictures and enables TV networks to offer a wider range of channels. What's more, a wide swath of the analog airwaves will go for free to public safety organizations, such as police and fire departments, so they can improve their communications systems.

People with cable, satellite or phone company TV services will continue to get broadcast stations. But those who rely on antennas to watch TV must ...

CES: Toshiba blurs the line between TV and PC

LAS VEGAS -- Like seemingly every other TV maker, Toshiba has noticed the online video revolution. It plans to offer an Internet-savvy set-top box and build some (limited) Web and networking capabilities into selected TVs launched later this year, although marketing VP Scott Ramirez wouldn't say which ones at this morning's International Consumer Electronics Show news conference. But Toshiba also announced a prototype far geekier than other major TV brands have done, called the Cell TV. Basically, it takes the ultra-powerful microchip from the PlayStation3 and puts it into a combination high-def TV, Internet TV and PVR. It made my mouth water.

Unfortunately, Toshiba plans to sell the thing, as Ramirez put it, "in the $5,000 to $10,000 range." Oh well.

The CES is partly about sales, partly about aspiration. Not consumers' aspirations, that is -- manufacturers. They display not just the products they're certain to manufacture, but the ones they would love to make if only the demand emerged. Typically, such wishful sorts of things are aimed at the very high end. Such is the case with the Cell TV, which Ramirez said will come in two parts: a large LCD monitor (at least 55" diagonally) and a set-top box with the aforementioned cell processor. The monitor will have four times as much resolution as today's top-of-the-line TVs, and the set-top will be able to find, record and play up to six video streams simultaneously. Cell TV owners will be able to watch four high-def shows on a single giant screen in the living room, while other members of their family can watch two additional high-def programs in different rooms.

One other thing about products like the Cell TV: The groundbreaking technologies they trumpet often trickle down into mass-market offerings. It seems inevitable that the public's demand for online video and processor-intensive HD formats will drive TV makers to put more powerful chips and more flexible software into their sets. (Ramirez's prediction that 1080P -- 1,980 by 1,080 pixels -- would eventually give way to 4K -- 3,820 by 2,160 -- seems like a good bet too.) The cell seems like overkill today, but it may be mainstream two years from now. Meanwhile, chip makers continue to expand the capabilities of the software built into their microprocessors; witness the recent move by Intel to support Adobe Flash, an extremely popular format for online video. And as TVs become smarter, blurring the distinction between their capabilities and a PC's, they'll be better able to serve as portals into the content and innovation of the Web.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

CES: Netgear tries again with Internet set-top boxes

LAS VEGAS -- The press conferences had scarcely started at the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show before Netgear demonstrated a new product that epitomizes one of the dominant themes of the show: a device that brings online video to the TV set. Two versions, in fact. In doing so, the company (probably unintentionally) showed what was wrong with previous efforts to bridge the PC-TV gap, and what's still missing from today's -- including its own.

The niftier of the two Netgear gadgets is the ITV3000, due this summer for about $200. The size of a small book, it can stream videos directly from the Internet without the aid of a PC. And unlike Netgear's first venture in this field three years ago -- dubbed the Digital Entertainer -- it can access a broad array of video sites online, including YouTube, NBC.com and MetaCafe. It supports paid movie downloads from CinemaNow, and, ahem, not-so-legitimate files downloaded through the BitTorrent protocol (a favorite of online movie pirates). It also offers a smart search function that can retrieve streaming videos from the Web at large, and curated collections of sites.

The other device is an updated version of the Digital Entertainer, the EVA9150, due next month for about $400. The product has evolved into a high-definition video jukebox, with half a terabyte of built-in storage to collate the video from the owner's home network. It also can stream videos from a selected menu of sites.

What neither device can do is take users wherever they might happen to want to go. Vivek Pathela, Netgear's general manager of home and consumer products, said the company would update the boxes regularly with new sources of video, but users won't be able to add to the list themselves. (The EVA9150 lets users enter URLs, but there's no guarantee the box can support the videos streamed or downloaded from there.) And there are a few notable missing pieces: Hulu, which is absent for technical and business reasons (Pathela said they're working on a licensing deal), Flickr and MySpace.

Maybe users won't care. As Pathela noted, YouTube streams 40% of the videos online, and the overall demand for online video is mind-boggling. According to a recent ComScore report, Pathela said, online video drew 150 million U.S. viewers in October alone, with 135 billion videos streamed -- up more than 50% from October 2007. The ITV3000 certainly supplies far more video than earlier iterations, and the user interface is much slicker. But it's also one more box users would have to add to their home entertainment center, one that requires a speedy broadband connection in the living room (Netgear helpfully supplies a variety of wireless and power-line adapters, albeit for an extra fee).

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

The NFL, live and in 3D

As I headed to Mann's Chinese 6 this afternoon to watch the anemic Oakland Raiders play the underachieving San Diego Chargers, I wondered, can good technology overcome bad entertainment? It's a recurring theme here in Los Angeles, where tech companies continually pitch ways to add digital pizazz to tired forms of programming. In this instance, a potentially tedious edition of Thursday Night Football was made tantalizing -- in theory -- by the chance to see a game for the first time in digital 3D, live on a giant screen. The video production and distribution was by Burbank's 3ality Digital, with Technicolor handling the satellite transmissions to three theaters in Hollywood, Boston and New York and Beverly Hills-based RealD projecting the 3D pictures.

The verdict? The experience wasn't jaw-dropping, but it was noticeably better than a conventional broadcast. The game was drama-free, yet the novelty of 3D made it hard for me to take my eyes off the screen -- at least until the Chargers' lead stretched to 27 points with less than a minute to go before halftime. The effect was subtle at times, but just as compelling as in "U2 3D," 3ality's concert film of the Irish rockers. The most striking thing in both cases was how much more you could see in three dimensions than in two.

The blue screen of disappointment

With the economy collapsing and the ranks of the unemployed growing, the last thing this country needs is a shortage of cheap entertainment. Perhaps that's why the Senate, unable to agree on plans for another economic stimulus package or a bailout for U.S. automakers, managed to approve a bill that would help consumers keep their televisions on after local stations turn off their analog channels on Feb. 17, 2009.

When those transmissions end, consumers who rely on over-the-air TV and don't have a digital tuner or converter box will be left with nothing but a blank screen. A trial run of the cutoff in Wilmington, N.C., in September went about as well as possible, yet numerous viewers were still caught unprepared. With 10 million or more consumers across the country relying on rabbit ears, chances are that thousands won't be ready for the shift even if the vast majority of Americans know it's coming.

That's why the Senate gave speedy passage to S 3663, by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). The bill, like a more prescriptive measure awaiting action in the House (HR 7013, by Santa Barbara Democrat Lois Capps), calls for the Federal Communications Commission to let stations temporarily continue broadcasting on their analog channels. The broadcasts would be limited to emergency messages and instructions for how to get help making the switch to digital, including a phone number to call and an URL to visit.

The measure makes sense, but it wouldn't address what's likely to be the biggest problem for the transition to digital. As the Wilmington experience demonstrated, a non-trivial percentage of TV viewers simply can't take all the steps needed to prepare an analog TV for digital broadcasts. (The easiest solution is to hook your TV up to cable or satellite service, but if you don't already have pay TV, that's an expensive way to go.) These folks might be able to buy a converter box, but they need help from family members, friends or volunteers to hook it up, program the remote and scan for digital signals. It's not rocket science, but it's not as easy as plugging a toaster into the wall and turning it on, either. That's why local governments and community groups need to start lining up volunteers now to help the elderly, the disabled and -- yes -- the clueless buy and hook up their digital converter boxes before their free TV gets lost in the digital transition.

Los Angeles Times photo

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.