If you expect to be shopping for a DTV converter box this winter, Best Buy may not be your best bet.

U.S. households can begin requesting -off coupons from the government in January 2008, and many owners of old analog TVs will be eager to redeem them. But Best Buy, the country’s largest consumer electronics retailer, may not be ready to accept the DTV coupons until “closer to April 1,” TV Technology reports.

A three-month delay from Best Buy is a major setback for the DTV transition.

The cutover to digital TV, with its myriad details, is difficult enough to explain to consumers. For months, Congress has been urging broadcasters to promote the change to DTV early and often. But if viewers cannot use their coupons at what is, for many households, the default store for electronics purchases, it undercuts the coupon program’s credibility.

The retailer told Congress this week that its computers and cash registers will not be ready to handle the government coupons on January 1. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released the government’s rules for the coupon program in March, so it’s not as if Best Buy hasn’t had enough time to prepare for the necessary changes to its systems.

In the retailer’s defense, it warned the government—in advance of its rulemaking—that it could not risk upgrading its point-of-sale systems between October and January “because these months include the heaviest shopping traffic and volume of transactions of the year.”

Still, I would ask, why didn’t they make the system upgrades in September and just schedule them to take effect four months later?

It was Congress that set January 1 as the kickoff for the converter box coupon program, so NTIA had no choice about the date. Recent rumblings paint a scenario in which consumers may not, after all, get coupons in January. The government’s contractor is supposed to begin accepting requests on New Year’s Day, but NTIA has indicated that coupons will not actually be mailed until eligible DTV converters are in local stores.

The Bush administration may have even signaled to retailers that if they weren’t ready in time, no big deal. Indeed, earlier this year the Commerce Department suggested as much, in the discussion section of its converter box coupon rules:

The [Digital TV] Act requires NTIA to accept requests for coupons between January 1, 2008 and March 31, 2009, and thus, it proposed that retailers be ready to redeem coupons starting January 1, 2008, consistent with the statutory guidance. NTIA expects widespread retailer POS system modifications to occur in the first quarter of 2008.

In other words, the news that stores may not be ready until April 1 is not really news to NTIA.

Earlier:
• Best Buy to sell DTV converter boxes
• Converter boxes at Best Buy…sort of
• Cheap converter boxes: Retailers not on board

• Link: TV Technology

• Consumers who don’t understand the digital TV transition “may be stampeded into making the wrong choice and spending a lot more money than they have to,” a consumer group official says.

• Movie studios oppose “digital cable ready plus” (DCR+), a two-way plug-and-play technology favored by the Consumer Electronics Association.

• Harris Corp. wins a technical Emmy award for its digital TV filtering technology.

Giving Credit Where [Partial] Credit Is Due Dept.: Best Buy announced Wednesday that it will carry DTV converter boxes and participate in the U.S. government -off coupon program next year (as we predicted in August). If you watch local stations over the air on an analog TV, finding a life-extending digital-to-analog converter for it in 2008 should not be the chore that it is today.

But if you don’t already own an obsolescent TV (or five), turns out you can’t buy one at Best Buy. The consumer electronics behemoth announced—again!—that its days of selling old-technology television sets are over.

Best Buy missed its original May 1, 2007, deadline for ending analog TV sales. The chain went on to be cited by the FCC for violating federal rules requiring that retailers display special signage, warning of the shutoff of analog broadcasts in 2009, in close proximity to analog-only TV sets.

“Best Buy is the first CE retailer to publicly announce an exit from the analog television business,” the company crowed in a press release last week. Stores were instructed to end analog TV sales on October 1, 2007, the company says.

I am pleased to see major retailers planning to stock DTV converters. Let’s hope they have them in stores in time for the launch of the federal coupon program on January 1, 2008. Converter boxes are not a big-ticket item, and the government’s program includes a long list of rules. For retailers, though, the final phase of the DTV transition should bring customers to their stores. Some converter-box shoppers may even walk out with flat-panel HDTVs.

LG Electronics will sell DTV converter boxes under its Zenith brand, according to the Associated Press. Zenith, once the leading American TV manufacturer, was a pioneer in remote control and digital television technologies. Today, South Korea’s LG positions Zenith at the lower end of the U.S. consumer electronics market. With an estimated retail price of , a digital-to-analog converter box is a decidedly low-end (albeit useful) product, so perhaps the Zenith tag should not come as a surprise.

LG is one of several electronics firms that will offer converter boxes. These small devices will allow millions of traditional TV sets to continue displaying over-the-air broadcasts after the analog TV shutdown in 2009. Beginning in January 2008, any U.S. household can request up to two coupons from the federal government, each worth off the price of a DTV converter.

Older Americans are expected to be a key segment of the converter-box market, and some late-adopters may still look to Zenith as a familiar and trusted name.

• Link: Houston Chronicle

• Will “white space” broadband devices actually protect your digital TV reception? Doug Lung, offering a technical analysis of the claims, remains unconvinced. Even cable TV reception could be threatened, he writes.

• The Center for American Progress wants Congress to (finally) address the public-interest obligations of DTV broadcasters. But FCC Chairman Martin does not want to impose further requirements.

• Consumer Federation of America chief Mark Cooper blasts cable industry’s DTV transition commercials, calling them “awful and disgusting.”