Tag: DTV

According to Geekosystem, many a DirecTV customer who owns the company's HD DVR woke up Tuesday to find that their device wouldn't work. The glitch was apparently a result of the satellite company's Whole-Home DVR service, which allows customers to record and watch shows in any room of their house with just one DVR unit. When this roll-out occurred late Monday night, some updated program guide ...

As we have reported, the switch to digital television has not been smooth for everybody. We're fairly sure we heard a collective sob on June 12th when many boxes went black around the country. In Memphis, Tennessee, Robert Monsarrat didn't lose the ability to watch television; he just had to change his routine a little bit. And it may have saved his life. A storm rolled through Memphis last ...

You can't say nobody warned you. After months and months of ubiquitous announcements (many from the President, himself), and a four-month postponement just to be sure, TV broadcasts will, finally, go exclusively digital today. Fortunately, most U.S. households are prepared. Still, though, according to a Wall Street Journal report, Nielsen estimates that 2.8 million are not. Slightly (but only ...

Times are tough and the markets are way down. People are losing jobs, industries are collapsing, and nobody knows when it all will end. That's not stopping people from upgrading televisions, though; a newly published report covered by the AP shows that HDTV sales are soaring, despite all the economic uncertainty. According to sales figures released by iSuppli Corporation, 7.8 million flat-panel ...

First, the good news. The number of people still unprepared for the DTV switchover is continuing to fall. The bad news? The number of households that will be unable to watch TV on June 12th still sits at about 3.5 million. That number is down from the roughly four million who were unprepared at the end of March, according to the most recent Nielsen survey. But, with only a month and a half to go, ...

Just days ago, we heard that the DTV voucher waitlist was completely gone, and now that those have started to flow again, the amount of Americans still unready for the switchover sits at 4.1 million. Compared to right around two months ago, that's definitely a marked improvement from 6.5 million still in the dark, and we fully anticipate that number to continually shrink as we inch closer to ...

For all of you still waiting for a little governmental assistance in buying that DTV converter box that you should've purchased months ago (we kid... a little), we've excellent news. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is overseeing the program, has announced that it has finally begun to ship $40 vouchers towards the purchase of these very boxes once ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/DTV_Switch_Doesn_t_Kill_TVs_Drunk_Septuagenarians_w_Guns_Do'; The elderly have been slightly behind in picking up on the DTV transition, so news of a frustrated 70-year old Missouri man doesn't surprise us too much. That the combination of losing his cable and being unable to get a DTV converter working drove him to shoot his TV and cause a short standoff ...

Today is the original deadline for the switch to digital broadcasts, and even though Congress agreed to push the deadline back till June, many stations are making the change anyway since the process was already well underway. We knew that many of the stations would be making the move to DTV on February 17 regardless of the extra time afforded them, but it was unclear which ones would be ...

We knew it was bound to happen, and sure enough, it's happening. For the millions of Americans still waiting for their $40 voucher before buying one of those newfangled DTV converter boxes, the US Senate has just given its stamp of approval on providing them a four month reprieve as it attempts to get its act together. Oddly, there's no mention of Congress looking for new sources of funding, ...

Consider this your final warning -- time is running out to get your government-funded DTV converter coupon. If you're still getting your TV over the air with a pair of rabbit ears, remember your set will stop working at midnight on February 17, unless you get a digital converter box. And be aware that there is a limited supply of the converter box coupons left from the government. The government ...

By now, you've probably seen at least one DTV transition commercial, and if not, you're clearly not watching enough television. Criticisms aside, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to point you at what will unquestionably be the most hilarious (albeit informative) digital TV conversion ad of all time. We won't even bother trying to explain what happens in this 1 minute, 53 second masterpiece, ...

Don't let the smooth transition experienced in Wilmington and other tests fool you, FCC member Kelly McDowell just returned from a tour in Afghanistan Alaska, Montana & Oklahoma, and he's seen things, terrible things. Things that have convinced him that the transition on February 17, 2009 "will be messy ... but we will get through it" when over the air broadcasts go all-digital. Hopefully ...

The economy is a funny thing. Thanks to reduced consumer spending due to the current financial crisis (no, you can't even escape it at Switched), coinciding with a boon in manufacturing output, this holiday season could see even more drastic cuts in the price of LCD TVs. Analysts expect prices to be slashed for Black Friday, and think the lower prices will last through next year. They expect ...

Surely, by now, you know that analog TV is going offline very soon (February 17th, 2009), right? Hopefully, you've received your coupon, hooked up your converter, or just gone ahead and used this as a good excuse to join the HDTV era. But, do you have one of those portable TVs that you bring along to the tailgate or switch on whenever the power goes out during big storms? If so, you're not ...