Punch cards

[Tim]

Aaron Konstam:
> Well Tim you may be pushing your luck on being right. 

;-)

> I have heard noting about pushing the digital switch to 2013. As far
> as I know in the US it is still 2009. Do you have a reference for this
> assertion you are making.

I first heard about on the radio, but forgot the all-important reference
to where this announcement came from.  A quick Google search gives the
following information:

  "at the Australian Broadcasting Summit, Senator Conroy announced the
  switchover date for Australian free-to-air TV: December 31, 2013."

So I guess finding documentation from that summit, or something from the
Senator, might do the trick.  It's now being called "switchover," so
that'd be the keyword to look for.

Here, it's been pushed back several times, because they've realised that
it's just not going to happen as the dates were approached.  The
stations weren't really ready, nor were the general public.

The radio host telling us the story about what will happen, taking
snippets from a report, was rather shocked by the information he
imparted:

$37.9 million to be spent on driving the digital switchover
$6.7 M to be spent on a logo and labelling scheme
$4.8 M for a digital tracker to assess what people were doing about it
$8.5 M (? I couldn't take notes fast enough) technical switchover
projects to evaluation digital TV transmissions in Australia
$16.6 M digital switchover taskforce
$0 for advertising and marketing campaigns
Being over seen by Townsend somebody, who was responsible for the
British switchover.

He was shocked at the waste and the duplication of what's already exists
(such as logos and labels), and how frivolous much of this is.  

I'm just as shocked.  If they're going to spend that much, they may as
well just heavily subsidise the set top boxes so people can buy them for
peanuts.  We only have a population of about 20 million in Australia,
many of whom live in the same house (e.g. if there's four to a house,
that's somewhere around 5 million boxes to get installed).

And you have to wonder why the stations don't promote the boxes more.
We have the occasional adverts on free-to-air TV saying how much better
it will be, and saying "best of all, it's all free" (after you've bought
the hardware).  But you'd think they'd be involved more in selling the
boxes, if they want to really push the switchover into happening.

-- 
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 important to the thread.)

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