According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there are 111,162,259 households in the United States. According to Nielsen, 5.8 million of these households are currently not ready for the analog to digital conversion mandated by law when President George W. Bush signed The Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005 on February 6, 2009. The conversion was supposed to take effect on or by February 17, 2009, thereby terminating the analog transmission of all TV broadcasts. However, in January 2009 Congress had begun debating delaying the required transition date, eventually passing the DTV Delay Act, and the Obama administration made a delay to the digital TV (DTV) transition official by moving the required date from February 17, 2009 to June 12, 2009.
The reprieve may give the approximately 20 percent of households that depend on terrestrial analog RF TV broadcasts (versus the 80 percent of households that receive TV signals via cable or satellite TV reception), an opportunity to either buy digital tuner televisions to replace their existing analog tuner televisions, or to purchase TV converter boxes. On the other hand, the transition may end up mired in the nation’s efforts to fully justify the benefits of full digitization. For comparison, consider the now 34-year-old effort to officially convert from U.S. Customary Units (coinage, weights, measures, etc.) to the Metric System, as stipulated in the Metric Conversion Act of 1975. Although the Metric System has gained partial use in a variety of sectors in the United States (e.g. consumer product labeling, construction, aviation, education, financial services, sports, etc.), metrication remains a long way away from full implementation.
Part of the reason for the failure of continued interest in metrication is because many Americans are unconvinced that metrication will enhance the competitiveness of the United States in world markets, as its proponents claim. There are also concerns about the costs of full implementation. Blended with those rationales is probably a dose of nostalgia for a system that dates back to medieval England, and is comprised of such old-world, pastoral sounding nomenclature as crowns, foolscap, nails, pennyweights, scruples, stones, weys, etc. Sound these off against the more clinical, technical metric system terminology such as hectare, kilometer, milligram, liter, megajoule, etc., and you may see that it just does not feel the same.
To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, two score and ten years ago the TV industry brought forth on this continent a new and revolutionary transmission standard, one which made color broadcasts possible in 1953. Even though that conversion allowed the prevailing black-and-white TVs to receive and display compatible-color broadcasts in black and white without any modification, for various reasons many people continued to prefer monochrome TVs to buying new, and expensive, color TVs. So maybe those nearly six million analog households remaining unconverted today is not entirely accidental or dismissible, and perhaps comprises more than just the expected statistical deviation from the norm. Perhaps many of these outliers will remain unconverted even by the new deadline, finding a curmudgeonic bliss in disdainfully thumbing their collective rabbit ears at the establishment. Or perhaps there is a more troubling reason related to socioeconomic conditions, and no less than President Obama cited his concerns that some of these households were situated at the edge of the “digital divide” and could be left out of the advantages of digital TV reception like wealthier American households.
Nevertheless, 641 stations adhered to the original February 17, 2009 deadline and switched to digital broadcasting. The stations had notified the FCC that they wanted to make the switch at the earlier date and asked that they be permitted to do so. According to Adweek, approximately 36 percent of all TV stations in the U.S. have upgraded their equipment to exclusively transmit digital signals.
Digitization has various consumer benefits, key 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.
Some media analysts worry that the commercialization of digital transmissions could continue to foment the oligopolic control of the media by conglomerates, to the detriment of public interest uses of the additional VHF/UHF transmission spectra. The government has stated that it plans to set aside some of the digital bandwidth for noncommercial use.
Another important plus associated with digital transmission versus analog transmission is that DTV includes HDTV (high-definition TV) as a component. The TV Nets are aggressively extolling the advantages of HDTV programming and now transmit their primetime content in HDTV. The Nets have generally made the commitment to transmit in HDTV; many, but not all, affiliates are re-transmitting their network feeds with HDTV signals. Given that the HDTV picture, especially when viewed on a television capable of displaying true high definition resolution, is clearer than the TV image generated from a standard definition digital signal, many consumers will come to expect all of their TV content to be provided in high definition.
On a related note, of the nearly 6 million American households that Nielsen reports are not ready for the analog to digital conversion, nearly 1.5 million are on a government waiting list to receive TV converter box coupons at a cost of $40 each. A maximum of two coupons can be requested by each household. The coupons enable people to purchase a TV converter box at a significant discount. Certified converter boxes are available from both national and local retailers, and can also be purchased online or by telephone for shipment directly to the purchaser’s home. Demand for the coupons has exceeded government projections, resulting in a coupon shortfall. The change of the effective date of the analog-to-digital conversion to June 12, 2009 gives the government agency responsible for managing coupon issuance more time and money (the agency will receive an additional infusion of up to $650 million in funding from the recently approved $787 billion economic stimulus plan) to make more coupons available to qualifying households.
By Darrell Woody
Gazette Staff Writer