Digital Transition

As February 17th swiftly approaches, people are readying themselves for the switch from analog to digital television. The transition will, in theory, improve overall picture and sound quality, along with a host of other benefits including making more efficient use of the broadcast spectrum. That’s if you can figure out how to hook it all up.
A basic definition for analog TV is signals that are transmitted to your TV by continuously varying radio waves. Most analog televisions are the big box TVs with the bunny rabbit antennas on top or TVs with a rooftop antenna. After February 17th, these types of TVs will no longer receive signals unless you purchase a DTV converter box. Along with these antenna TVs, televisions without a digital tuner will need a converter box. One of the hardest parts is figuring out if your TV has a digital tuner or not. It gets confusing because a lot of newer televisions have stickers exclaiming they are “HD-ready,” but they do not include digital tuners so they will need this converter box.
The converter box has been available for several years, although the market was limited because it was fairly pricey at around $200 or more. The price has since dropped dramatically, and you can get one from around $40 to $60. The government is doing its part to help by offering a $40 coupon to anyone who applies for it, but there is a waiting list of over 2 million people.
The people that are affected by this digital transition are the ones that are least ready for it, the elderly and the poor. If money is hard to come by and you’re trying to support a family, the last thing you want to do is spend money on a converter box. Some older folks have used rabbit ears all their lives because that is all they’ve known. My grandma is one of them. She could easily have had cable or satellite hooked up, but she doesn’t want to deal with it, or pay for it. She reads instead of watching TV, and only needs the television for the news. Is she living the past? Sure, but she likes it like that. Now she needs to get a converter box for her television, which will cost her money and time trying to figure out how to set it up. Elderly folks are not as tech-savvy as the younger generation, so hooking up the converter boxes can be tough work for them. It may seem easy to you and I, but for them it might be something they’ve never done before.
According the Nielsen Research Center, an estimated 6.5 million homes are not ready for the digital transition. Because of this fact, the government has recently put a bill forward to delay the digital transition from Feb. 17 to June 12. On 1/28/09, it was voted down in the House, but next week it will most likely be voted on again. There are positives and negatives to the delay. A positive would be that with so many households not ready, the delay would give them time to get the converter box. I think the negatives heavily outweigh the positives though. The coupon program, which ran out of money in January and has already cost over $1 billion, would have to be continued. An additional $650 million would have to be spent on coupons and educational programs about the transition. This would be an unnecessary use of the government’s money, especially in such hard economic times.

Sources: "The Digital TV Transition: More Confusion", New York Times, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/the-digital-tv-transition-confusion-reigns/
"Analog TV Shutoff Still Likely to Be Delayed", New York Times
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/analog-tv-shutoff-still-likely-to-be-delayed/
http://dtvfacts.com/faq/
https://www.dtv2009.gov