CEA Pres. Gary Shapiro Tues. hailed a House-Senate DTV conference...

to see that policy was based on facts,” Shapiro told our affiliate Consumer Electronics Daily. CEA didn’t push for or against a DTV converter subsidy, “but we advocated strongly that a hard deadline be set and the facts on TV set usage be considered,” Shapiro told us. Citing FCC data, the report said a Feb. 17, 2009, deadline would have “little impact” on most TV households. Cable and DBS households have “slowly but generally increased in recent years,” pointing toward an “even higher” proportion in 3 years, when analog service goes dark, the report said. A 2004 NAB prediction that many more blacked-out households was flawed, apparently because it failed to weigh projections on future DTV sales, or cable and DBS growth, the report said. The report faulted the Govt. Accountability Office (GAO) for endorsing NAB’s data without doing its own survey. Even so, an NAB spokesman said: “Regardless of the misinformation and bogus numbers provided by CEA during the entire DTV transition, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has testified that more than 20% of all homes are exclusively reliant on over the air television signals.” After analyzing the data, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) told conference committee members the legislation’s converter-box program “is adequately funded to meet the projected demand for coupons, which CBO estimates to be approximately 20 million,” the report said. Even if NTIA -- charged with running the converter box program -- takes from the subsidy fund all administrative costs anticipated in the bill, the remainder still would cover more than 20 million $40 coupons good toward converter box purchases, the report said. And each $40 of the fund the NTIA doesn’t spend on administration “is another coupon it can make available to consumers,” it said.