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The digital television (DTV) cutover in the United States finally happened yesterday (12 June 2009). The FCC reports that over 700,000 calls have been received at 1-888-CALL-FCC and other hotlines. Web sites like http://www.dtv.gov/ have been flooded with users, too. Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, New York City, Philadelphia and Boston generated the most call volume.

The DTV cutover happened here in Hawaii on 15 January 2009, and has been happening in stages across the USA since then. Calls about how to use DTV converter boxes accounted for 30% of the calls. Another 20% of the calls concerned re-scanning issues. When the cutover happened, some converter boxes needed to find the DTV channels again.

See this Associated Press article called Digital TV hot line gets 700,000 calls over switch for more details.

New services

The cutover finally allows US businesses to offer new telecommunications services based on DTV. The Wall Street Journal mentions Qualcomm’s FLO TV, a service that lets Verizon and AT&T mobile users in 39 US cities watch live television on high-end mobile phones. Both mobile carriers will get access to the old analog television channels, which will be used to expand mobile bandwidth and improve data speeds.

See Business Opportunities Open Up With US Digital TV Shift and this SFGate article called FLO TV finally comes to the Bay Area after DTV transition for more details.

Image courtesy of craig1black on flickr through a Creative Commons license.

Related pages and posts on billso.com

• Digital television
• 15 January 2009: Hawaii’s move to digital TV surprises some residents
• 15 December 2008: All day digital TV test in Hawaii
• 31 May 2008: Advertisers worried about digital television conversion
• 16 May 2008: Want to test your digital television in Hawaii?
• 25 March 2008: Digital TV is coming
• 18 January 2008: Digital TV and business models
• 12 November 2007: I want a better television - but it’s not ready yet
• 12 September 2007: The Google Phone and the iPhone – both looking for software and spectrum
• 5 July 2004: San Diego Padres promote HDTV

Jerry Jones wanted the Dallas Cowboys’ new football stadium to be the biggest and best he could build.

Leave it to Jerry Jones to buy the world’s largest HDTVs for his new stadium.

According to Dallas Cowboys Show Off Their Big New TV on the Dallas Observer’s Sportatorium blog, the video weighs 600 tons, hangs 90 feet above the playing field, and has its own 10-story elevator.

There are more photos in the Observer’s blog, and at the Cowboys’ and the city of Arlington’s stadium sites.

One of the most popular pages on billso.com is my APA style and formatting page. All of the graduate programs at my university require APA formatting in written assignments. When I first started teaching at HPU in 2002, I had never used APA style, so I had to learn about the topic while I was teaching my courses. I wrote short handouts with examples of APA formatting. In 2004, I had posted an early version of my APA page to one of my web sites.

The APA will release the 6th edition of the Publication Manual on 1 July 2009. The major changes include a more comprehensive system for identifying electronic references.

The new manual also asks writers to include a DOI (digital object identifier) for each reference list entry. Each DOI is a permanent web link to an article or book. Students tend to list their university library’s document, which isn’t helpful when the reader doesn’t have access to that library. There are millions of articles and books that have DOIs, but because there are registration fees involved, it’s not a comprehensive system.

I’ve added a new page to billso.com about DOI, and I’m starting to update my APA page, too.

I’ve been using FriendFeed for over a year now. It’s a great little aggregation site that consolidates my activities from several social media and networking sites. FriendFeed is run by a few Google alumni, and yesterday they released a beta version of the site’s interface at http://beta.friendfeed.com. It looks a lot like Twitter, even though FriendFeed offers many more features than Twitter does.

Lists and filters are important tools for using FF well. Otherwise, it’s very easy to be overwhelmed by FF. The real-time updates in FriendFeed, in which new messages are constantly scrolling down the screen, is impressive and intimidating.

Ryan Ozawa, a fellow Oahu-based blogger who also uses Twitter and FriendFeed, posted an article this morning called “FriendFeed: What If Twitter Worked?” It’s worthwhile reading, as Ryan makes his case that Twitter suffers from stability issues, sometimes referred to as the “fail whale” syndrome. Twitter is a simple enough service, so it’s attracting thousands of new users every day. As more users join Twitter, the service has problems supporting the added volume.

I like Twitter’s UI - it’s minimal, and a bit like Google. MySpace and Facebook have as much visual clutter as Yahoo.

Ruby is taking some of the blame for Twitter’s twoubles, as Twitter API developer Alex Payne announced that Scala is the new language of choice: see Twitter jilts Ruby for Scala for some background.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

9 January 2009: Phishers hit Twitter
7 January 2009: How Twitter got hacked
15 August 2008: Mobile social media sites
31 July 2008: Manoa Geeks meeting and social networking
9 July 2008: Is email in danger from microblogging?
23 May 2008: My social networking activity