One day before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote another time on a bill aimed at delaying the switch from analog TV to digital television, confusion and anger among politicians and journalists still runs high.
"The next few weeks are going to be extremely difficult -- as difficult as any that this Commission, and millions of TV consumers, has ever faced," FCC Chairman Michael Copps said to the FCC Consumer Advisory Committee at the end of last week.
"That's because we never really dug deep enough to understand all the consequences that would attend the DTV transition -- not just the intended good results, but all the unintended consequences, too, the ones that usually cause the big problems. It's because we didn't have a well thought out and coherent and coordinated plan to ease the transition -- a plan to combine the resources we needed to avoid disruption."
If you have cable or satellite TV, you will be unaffected by the digital transition, whenever it takes place.
Unless the House passes the bill tomorrow, which would delay the DTV transition until June 12, the transition will take place as scheduled on Feb. 17.
Democrats support delaying the bill to give the estimated 6.5 million unprepared Americans time to either purchase a converter box, digital cable subscription, or purchase a new TV. The U.S. government opened up a program offering $40 converter box vouchers, but ran out of money in the middle of last month.
Rep. Henry Waxman, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce, said there are officially 1.8 million households waiting for 3.3 million DTV vouchers.
"Without a delay of the transition date, few, if any, of these households will receive their coupons by February 17 because of the time it takes to process coupon requests," Waxman wrote in a letter to members of the House, urging them to delay the transition.
Last week, the Senate approved the DTV delay bill, but when the issue was passed to the House, the necessary two-thirds majority wasn't met.
Prior to being elected president, and once officially becoming president, Obama has supported a delay in the DTV switch, mentioning how many people will be left behind if the switch is made in a couple of weeks.
