Coupon-Eligible Converter Box

» see dtv2009.gov as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 told the Federal Communications Commission to make every full-power television station in the United States stop broadcasting in analog before midnight on 17 February 2009. Millions of American households still watched over the air, on sets whose tuners understood nothing else. A converter box went between the antenna and the television, took the new digital signal and handed the set something it could display. Congress put up $40 a box.

The device was defined by federal specification rather than by the market. The NTIA announced the standards at a news conference on 12 March 2007, and manufacturers could self-certify compliance so long as they sent in test results and two units for the agency to poke at. The spec was as specific about what a box must not do as about what it must. Component video outputs were disqualifying, and so was HDMI. The subsidy was there to keep an old set working, so the spec made sure nobody used it to buy themselves a picture upgrade on the public dime.

Each household could get two coupons, worth $40 each, and they arrived in the post as a plastic card that looked like a debit card and could not be spent on anything but a converter box. They went dead 90 days after mailing. Printed across the bottom of the program's own logo were a toll-free number, 1-888-DTV-2009, and the address of a federal website that no longer resolves.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the money ran out first ~

By the end of 2008 about 40 million coupons had been requested and 16 million redeemed, against an estimated 35 million televisions that were going to lose their picture. On 4 January 2009 the NTIA started putting new requests on a waiting list, having issued $1.34 billion worth and hit the obligation limit Congress had set. Three days later Consumers Union and Representative Ed Markey were both publicly arguing that the February shutoff should be pushed back, because the coupons people needed could not be sent.

They got their delay. The DTV Delay Act was signed on 11 February 2009 and moved the transition to 12 June. The waiting list cleared on 24 March, and the reason it cleared is the detail worth keeping: 17 million coupons had been mailed out and allowed to expire unused, which released the money to pay for the next batch. Of everything issued to that point, 25.7 million had actually been spent, which is 56 percent.

~ the last week ~

Toward the end of July 2009, with the analog signals already gone, people were still requesting 35,000 coupons a day. On 30 July the number was 78,000. On 31 July, the last day it was possible to ask, 169,000 requests came in. Anything postmarked that day or earlier was honored.

Peter DeFazio in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate had introduced legislation to keep the program running past July and to subsidize antennas alongside the boxes. Their bill would also have forced the cable and satellite companies to sell a $10 broadcast-only package to anyone who had lost their channels. It went nowhere. At midnight on 31 July 2009 the program expired with no extension.

~ what went back to the treasury ~

The NTIA's final accounting said 4,287,379 coupons had been requested and never redeemed, which is a lot of plastic cards sitting in drawers going quietly out of date. About $250 million of the original authorization was never used, and the additional $490 million that February's legislation had freed up was never touched at all. One unnamed agency source put the amount handed back to the Treasury at $241.6 million, with $2.6 million spent on closing the program down.

~ no envelope ever came here ~

None of this reached Turkey, and the shape of it could not have. Turkish terrestrial television moved off analog on its own much slower clock, with deadlines that kept sliding, and there was never a federal card in the post to soften it. By the time any of that mattered the question had mostly been answered on the roof anyway, because satellite dishes went up on apartment blocks here years before a digital deadline was a thing anyone discussed. What is distinctly American in this story is not the converter box. It is the idea that the state would write to 40 million households, enclose a payment instrument good for one product category, and print a 1-888 number on it.

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