How many TVs?
NTIA, remarkably, never had a hard fix on how many TVs might be affected. When the DTV bill was passed, estimates varied widely, from a low of 20 million to more than 70 million. Republicans, who wanted to spend as little as possible on DTV, tended to embrace the smaller estimate; Democrats favored the higher one. NTIA decided to do a little sleuthing on its own. Since cable and satellite customers wouldn’t be affected by the switch, NTIA figured they wouldn’t request coupons in large numbers, one of the former officials recalls. NTIA soon hatched a plan: It would ask cable and satellite TV companies to provide numbers of subscribers, by market, to the government. The agency planned to cross-reference those lists with U.S. population maps to come up with a guesstimate of the number and location of free-TV households. The response from cable and satellite? “They turned us down flat,” the same source says. “They told us they considered that information to be confidential.” In the end, NT
