Unfortunately, those ordinary people who don't understand what the transition means never will understand, no mater how long the analog cutoff is postponed.
My only beef is the winter cutoff date in northern climes.We've been taking literally hundreds of calls, at our invitation via several spots and two 1 hour long live programs, mostly (almost exclusively) from retirees who have purchased their converter box only to find out that they cannot receive most of the digital UHF signals with their current (ancient) outdoor antenna, even though they could watch snowy UHF and decent VHF.
The other big chunk of calls are from retirees that just can't comprehend how to operate a converter box. "Channel Scan? What is that? Can't I just type in "23"?" "I plugged in the converter box, but when I tune my TV to channel 23 I get nothing."
Delaying the analog cutoff will not change these people's confusion, and no amount of 'education' will help. The only thing that could make things better is to have a government subsidized army of techs make hundreds of house calls to every one of these 'confused' retirees, and to perform upgrades their antenna equipment as necessary, either free or at cost.
I believe that when the UK allowed a broadcaster to start using a VHF frequency that was normally used for VCR to TV RF connections, they had to pay to have a tech visit the home of every person with a VCR to retune the RF output to a different channel.
John----- Original Message ----- From: "Cliff Benham" <flyback1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Because the Obama administration senses that lots of ordinary people don't understand what the transition means.
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