FCC May Act Soon on CEA's DTV Tuner Petition December 31, 2004 12:00am Source: Warren Publishing, Inc. Warren Publishing's COMMUNICATIONS DAILY reports that the CE industry's petition to move up the deadline for all TV sets with 25"-36" screen sizes to have DTV tuners began circulating on the FCC's 8th floor. As you may recall, in November the CEA and the Consumer Electronics Retailers Coalition (CERC), in a joint petition, asked the Commission that the July 2006 date by which all such receivers must have DTV tuners be moved up to March 2006 and that the July 2005 date by which 1/2 the sets must be ATSC-capable be eliminated. The article goes on to indicate that broadcasters oppose delaying when tuners should be implemented, and that the CE industry argued that the 50% requirement would slow consumer migration to TVs with built-in DTV tuners because consumers would choose a lower-priced product with otherwise similar features, except for the DTV tuner. The last paragraph is the most interesting however: "The CE industry should be placing labels on those analog sets, informing the consumer that the sets won't work in 4-5 years, after the DTV transition is complete, a source said, but CEA has said it doesn't want to place labels on sets. When are broadcasters going to STOP misleading people about the potential obsolescence of analog TV receivers? There is NOTHING that is going to stop working in 4-5 years, unless the set dies. Analog cable will still be around, not to mention NTSC broadcasts; or have broadcasters resigned themselves to the notion that a HARD 2009 analog cutoff deadline will be enforced by Congress? And EVERY analog set will KEEP WORKING with the addition of an appropriate external set-top box, be it from a cable company, DBS operator, or an ATSC receiver sold at retail. My gut instincts tell me that the CE industry is going to win this round... Regards Craig ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.