A key reason President Obama supported extending the mandatory conversion from analog television transmission to digital was concern that certain demos would be left out of benefitting from receiving digital television signals, due to the “digital divide,” or the gap between poorer and wealthier American households which results in new and necessary technologies skipping over certain Americans.

Digitization has various consumer benefits, primary among which is that off-on digital signals are more “compact” than wave-like analog signals, enabling a more efficient management of the parts of the radio spectrum used for television. As a result, broadcasters can deliver more content more efficiently, which means that consumers can have more TV stations, music, etc. delivered to their homes in the same signal stream. The government also stands to profit. DTV uses the same 6 MHz bandwidth as analog TV (ATV) it replaces, but DTV channels can be packed in adjacent channel slots, whereas with ATV transmission technology it is not possible to transmit on adjacent channels in the same geographic area. Our government can remove a fraction of the VHF and UHF (channels 52 to 69) spectra from television uses and auction them off to commercial buyers wanting to expand their voice and data services. Selling off lanes on this “digital freeway” may generate billions of dollars.

A month has passed since the transition to digital TV became effective on June 12, 2009, and approximately 1.2 million American households are still unable to receive digital TV transmissions. According to Nielsen, about 600,000 of those homes have household incomes of less than $25,000 per year. To some extent, the feared socioeconomic technology divide is being manifested in these statistics which reveal that the chasm between those with digital signals (about 99 percent of homes), and younger, poorer households, where the head of household is under 35, that are least likely to have digital reception.

By Darrell Woody

Gazette Staff Writer