According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the federal hotline set up to hear calls relating to the mandatory DTV transition has had over 700,000 calls since Friday morning, the day the analog signals were cut off.
200,000 of the calls were related to the federal coupons towards digital converter boxes, perhaps implying a significant amount of people still do not have the right equipment to receive digital signals.
Another 200,000 calls were from consumers who have the boxes but were confused on how to operate them successfully. The FCC told many to “re-scan the airwaves for digital frequencies,” and says 99 percent of the problems were solved.
Many others called about problems with reception, which is a much deeper problem than simple converter box issues.
“Our job is far from over,” said FCC Chairman Michael Copps. “This transition is not a one-day affair. We have known about re-scanning and reception issues for some time and have been doing our best to get the word out.”
The most callers came from the Chicago, Illinois area, but significant calls came from Dallas, New York, Philadelphis and Baltimore as well.
The Commerce Department recently reported they had sent out coupons for over 60 million converter boxes, but were still receiving over 100,000 requests a day, even during the last week. Research firm SmithGeiger LLC says there are probably still over 2 million households which are not prepared, despite repeated warnings and a full marketing campaign by the government. The most likely groups to not be prepared? Minorities, people over 65, and people under the age of 35.
Result for: converter boxes
In January, the US Government postponed the mandatory DTV transition from February until June 12th, as it was clear that over 6 million households were not ready.
Today, the federal Department of Commerce has said that if you are still unready and have not applied for a converter box coupon, you should do so no later than Monday, or risk having no TV signal by the time of the transition.
Every household can receive two $40 coupons to use towards the purchase of converter boxes, and more information about the coupons can be found at 888-DTV-2009 or www.DTV2009.gov.
As of May 10th, Nielsen estimated that there are still 3.3 million households not ready for the transition.
Result for: converter boxes
Just in case there wasn’t enough chaos surrounding the US DTV transition, an executive from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) gave the FCC some more bad news last Thursday. Speaking at an open meeting of FCC commissioners on the DTV transition Michael Petricone, CEA’s Senior Vice President for Governmental Affairs, said there may soon be a shortage of converter boxes.
The problem, Petricone explained, is the consumer electronics industry’s inability to accurately predict demand for the boxes, most of which will be purchased with the assistance of government vouchers. Once the transition is complete there will be little or no market for them, which is why most manufacturers stopped production in early January in anticipation of a February 17 switchover.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen problems with the DTV converter supply chain. With some notable exceptions, such as Best Buy and Radio Shack, many retailers were unable to meet consumer demand last summer. During the last few months of 2008 retailer stock seemed to catch up to demand.
Ironically the good news for consumers in need of DTV converters is the bad news for the economy. Due to decreased demand for consumer electronics many assembly lines which would normally have been re-tooled to make other products have simply been shut down instead. This means it should be possible to get additional units on store shelves in half the normal time.
