National Organizations Ask FCC to Look Into Upgrade Issue of Digital TVs

The American Association of People with Disabilities, Consumer Federation of America, National Hispanic Media Coalition, New America Foundation, Telecommunications Research and Action Center, and World Institute on Disability urged the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether the lack of an automatic upgrade capability in digital televisions (DTVs) is hurting consumers, particularly those with disabilities. In a letter to the FCC, the groups stated that the lack of such a capability could leave consumers with obsolete DTVs shortly after they are purchased due to software problems with the DTVs themselves, changes to V-Chip and emergency alerting regulations, and enhancements to accessibility technologies like captioning and video description. They noted recently announced software problems with V-Chips in televisions and reception tuners in digital converter boxes the government is subsidizing. Furthermore, the organizations believe that this issue could potentially be solved with a simple, inexpensive automatic software upgrade that allows manufacturers to correct software errors quickly and easily with little to no burden on the consumer. Automatic update capability could also assist people with disabilities by enabling rapid dissemination of new innovations and enhancements to existing technologies for captioning, video description, and alerting. Instead of waiting for a new base of DTVs with enhanced accessibility options to disseminate across the market, an automatic update capability could allow for such technology to be distributed much faster.
http://www.trac.org/newsroom/releases/archives/2007/national-organizatio...
* Read the letter
http://www.trac.org/on-trac-for-2009/articles/letter-to-the-fcc.html