Senate Staffers To Get DTV Briefing
Update is scheduled for Thursday morning at 9:30 a.m.
By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 5/13/2009 4:51:06 PM EDT
The Senate Commerce Committee will get its own DTV transition update.
According to sources on and off the Hill, staffers on both the Republican and Democratic side will get an update on the status, similar to one provided to the FCC at its public meeting Wednesday.
That will include a slideshow by NTIA coupon box program administrator Bernadette McGuire-Rivera. Currently, there is enough money in the program to send out coupons to everyone who asks for them, says NTIA. If it looks like there might not be, the agency is prepared to prioritize coupons for the 3.3 million households Nielsen says are unready for the transition.
The Hill update is scheduled for Thursday morning at 9:30 a.m.
The FCC said Wednesday that a total of 927 stations will be pulling the plug on analog June 12, and conceded that despite their best efforts to educate analog-only households, some screens will go dark.
The Senate Commerce briefing seems appropriate because it was Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA) and ranking member Kay Bailey Hutchison who motorpersoned a compromise bill that moved the date from Feb. 17 to June 12. That move was in large part to insure that NTIA would have enough money and time to clear out a backlog of converter box coupon requests, which it has since done.
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