The DIV Transition Is Almost Here

Mark February 17 on your brand-new 2009 calendar. That’s the date when analog television broadcasting will cease in the United States.

The DTV transition has been a long time coming. Analog broadcasting ruled the airwaves for so long, it boggles the mind. National Television Systems Committee (NTSC) was initially adopted as the black-and-white standard in 1941 and then retrofitted for color in 1953. It was designed for round-cornered screens of about 8 inches. If you had uttered the words “home theater” to a member of the NTSC, the response would have been: “Huh?” The epitome of video chic was a tiny porthole on a doghouse-sized cabinet. No one could have imagined todays sexy wall-mounted sets with two million pixels on flat-panel screens measured in feet.

Since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted the ATSC broadcast standard in 1996, DTV sets have taken over the market. DTV signals have also become widely available by antenna, cable, satellite, and Telco. But analog sets still operate in 13 million homes, according to Nielsen. Those are the folks who will be most affected when the analog signals stop coming next month.

The concept of an all-digital broadcast system got its first large-scale test last September in Wilmington, North Carolina. Focal TV stations cut off analog signals, and everyone held their breath to see what would happen next. The first day, the FCC got 800 calls from viewers whose sets went dark. In the first week, the number of distress calls totaled 1,800. But that was fairly modest collateral damage from a total market of 400,000 viewers. The FCC pronounced the experiment 99 percent successful, and city officials breathed a sigh of relief.

Even so, the switch from analog to digital broadcasting will create winners and losers. Viewers who lose one or more channels because of the change in coverage patterns will be the losers. Those who get HDTV will be the winners. What may prove problematic is that the winners have been enjoying their spoils for some time — while the losers are about to get a lot more vocal on February 17.

But they don’t need to sit in the dark. The federal government has been mailing $40 coupons to anyone who needs a set-top box to adapt digital signals for analog sets. If anyone you know needs one, call (888) DTV-2009 or check out the

More Buy HDTVs as Transition Looms

As the DTV transition draws near, what do we know about today’s viewers? According to the NPD Group’s survey of 1,500 viewers, about 46 percent of them already own HDTVs. Another 30 percent plan to buy an HDTV by the end of 2008, presumably taking advantage of sweet holiday deals. If that turns out to be correct, a large majority of viewers will be HD equipped by the transition. The DTV transition has been well publicized, according to 55 percent of the survey respondents.

However, only 6 percent have taken advantage of the federal subsidy for set-top adapters. That doesn’t sound like much, but it seems to reflect the small percentage of the population who depend on both analog over-the-air signals and analog sets.

Picture quality is the top priority for most TV buyers, says a survey by iSuppli. The only exceptions are those who earn less than $25,000, those who care more about price, and those who earn more than $200,000 and care more about brand. But what about picture size? Interestingly enough, it ran a distant fifth on the viewer priority list. In the age of HDTV, quality trumps quantity. What a refreshing discovery.

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