Hearing of House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet: Preparing Consumers for the End of the Digital Television Transition
HEARING OF HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE ON TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND THE INTERNET: PREPARING CONSUMERS FOR THE END OF THE DIGITAL TELEVISION TRANSITION
March 10, 2005
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Mr. Markey. Thank you. I thank the gentleman from Illinois, and I commend Chairman Upton for calling this hearing today. And I commend you for anything that you had to do with this hearing as well.
Mr. Shimkus. I just got it started.
Mr. Markey. And I commend everybody else who did anything at all to make this the obviously entertaining hearing which it is going to be.
Consumer education and awareness about the DTV transition will be critical for the success of any plan that ends analog television broadcasting. It is particularly troublesome that more hasn't been done already to inform consumers about the transition. Setting up websites with information is helpful, such as the information that the FCC has put up, but we must remember that the context in which that is happening. We are talking chiefly about consumers who don't get cable, probably don't subscribe to satellite service, either. We are talking, according to the GAO, about some 20 million households who rely exclusively on free, over-the-air television, half of whom have household incomes of under $30,000 a year. In other words, these are not likely to be people with computers at home visiting the FCC website.
In addition, we must also keep in mind the shockingly high number of consumers who continue to walk into stores every day and to buy analog TV sets, sets which, to the credit of the manufacturing industry, typically last 15 to 20 years. In 1997, I offered an amendment in this committee to end the sale of analog televisions by 2001. That amendment was defeated. But the FCC, on its own, subsequently, belatedly, and only a couple of years ago, put in place a staggered, dual analog-digital tuner mandate so that consumers buying sets would be able to receive digital broadcasts once analog TV ended. Yet this delay in getting digital TVs into the market in an affordable way has significantly hindered our ability to bring the DTV transition to an orderly and timely conclusion.
For instance, last year alone, in 2004, the television industry sold 31 million TV sets, just over 1 million of them included digital tuners to receive digital TV signals. That means that last year approximately 30 million TV sets were sold that had only analog TV reception capability. Let me repeat that. Last year, 30 million analog TV sets were sold. Those consumers who bought them were unlikely to have been told that the government intends, during the normal life of that TV set, to end analog television broadcasts, and they certainly didn't get any warning label to that effect in the box.
For example, my brother-in-law sent me a brand-new, 27-inch analog TV set for Christmas in 2004. It still sits there with obviously some difficult questions in my mind in terms of how you ask your brother-in-law to get you a different TV set because he didn't do a good enough job in understanding the digital transition----
Mr. Shimkus. You just did.
Mr. Markey. [continuing] that is underway. Well, I will tell you one thing about my brother-in-law, he has a life. As a result, he does not watch C-Span, okay. So I have high confidence that we are having this amongst that small group of dedicated, get-a-life crowds that is obsessed with watching Congressional hearings all day. And as--and so I am looking for expert help today as to how to handle that sensitive family discussion. Okay. And what those words might be with my brother-in-law with that TV set, to be honest with you, which still sits in a box in my house in Malden, Massachusetts, as I wonder how to handle that issue. So I will be looking for advice from everyone of our experts here as to how to handle that situation, which I can then pass on to others who are going to be similarly situated this whole coming year and all of next year with this very same, very touchy social problem.
So this is a huge issue. There have been 48 million analog sets that have been sold 2 years prior to the government's originally targeted as the year for ending analog television broadcasts. So even as we explore this possibility of warning labels, we have to recognize that by the time any bill passes containing that requirement, the bulk of the tens of millions of analog sets for which such labels are most necessary have already been sold.
And so we have a very important hearing that we are having today, Mr. Chairman, and I thank you for conducting it.
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