There is a news story in B&C today on a letter we just sent to the Obama transition team: DTV Transition Call Center Would be Ready by Feb. 17, says NCTA.

As the story notes:

[President-elect Barack Obama's] transition team met with industry and government stakeholders in Washington last month to get a status report on the transition, and concluded more needed to be done to make sure viewers predicted millions of calls about the transition could be answered in a timely fashion.

So, we’ve responded with this letter, which I have now posted to NCTA’s website. It’s addressed to Tom Wheeler, who headed NCTA from 1976-84 and is currently the Transition Agency Group Leader for Obama’s Presidential Transition Team. The letter reports that efforts to provide a national, coordinated DTV transition call center would be ready by February 17, the current date for the transition to take place.

The plan calls for the use of up to 7,000 live operators during a period leading up to and for several weeks after Feb. 17, efforts that would require expenditures of approximately $20 million of out-of-pocket costs, most of it expended by the cable industry, and would include contracting third-party capacity, integrating and purchasing trunk line capacity, the hiring of English and Spanish speaking live agents, training, and the development of scripts.

These efforts will be ready to go if the current transition date of Feb. 17 stays in place; but have been engineered with the flexibility to change if the transition date is extended (as is being discussed by some).

Tags: Barack Obama, DTV Transition, Tom Wheeler

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Digital Transition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.