The switch to all-digital television broadcasts is about three weeks away, and thousands of Coloradans who were able to get free TV signals might be in the dark.
Either by choice or lack of knowledge, many consumers who rely on free television won’t be able to watch their favorite shows on Feb. 17, the day analog signals are replaced by modern digital ones.
And there are thousands more who the federal government says won’t get any reception no matter their efforts because the signal simply won’t reach them, blocked by a tree, a gully or the aluminum siding on the house.
The trouble is, no one will really know who’s right until midnight of the transition, whenever that ultimately happens.
“We really have no way of knowing whose maps, whose calculations, whose estimates are accurate until Feb. 17,” said Byron St. Clair, president of the National Translator Association in Westminster, which represents rural communities that rely on signal relays for their television.
And the date itself might even change this week as a Senate committee prepares to vote on a measure that would extend the deadline into June.
The Nielsen Co. says as many as 72,000 Denver-area households won’t see a thing because they’ve done nothing to get ready — or don’t know the transition is coming.
Only free-TV viewers are affected. Cable and satellite subscribers are fine, as those providers will continue to transmit in analog or provide the equipment needed to continue without interruption.
Anyone with an analog television relying on antenna service will need a converter box that will change the digital signal to one the television can process. And consumers who use a DTV or HDTV will still need a good antenna to be able to draw UHF and VHF signals.
Ever since Congress passed the Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005, the nation has been awash in warnings, advisories and other messages of the impending shutoff and the need to be prepared. But it’s also been ensnared by confusion, misstatements and outright lies by those looking to profit from the ignorance of others.
“Just trying to understand what DTV is all about, there has been absolute confusion,” said Nikki Shears, the Federal Communications Commission Denver district director. “The bottom line is some people will do better than others.”
A firm date was chosen to ensure uniform compliance rather than a dragging wave of participation. Too, the government wanted to sell the lower broadcast spectrum that stations were abandoning — the new digital ones are largely found in the UHF band, which runs from channels 14 to 69 — to wireless providers and emergency services.
12-week delay possible
The lack of preparation — Nielsen estimates more than 6.5 million households are not ready — has some congressmen pressing for a 12-week delay in the mandatory transition date, a move the Obama administration has supported.
Broadcasters resist an extension mostly because it would require them to continue expensive analog transmissions. Wireless companies such as Verizon and AT&T have said they would comply with a delay, though they would lose money by putting off plans to use portions of the VHF spectrum they had just purchased.
More troubles brewed in early January when the agency responsible for distributing $40 federal government coupons toward the purchase of a converter box — a component necessary for older television sets to work in the digital age — said it had hit its limit, leaving millions of Americans to pay for the item outright.
That’s left consumers who rely on over-the-air (OTA) television, many of them elderly or poor, wondering whether they’ll have any television to watch.
Yet federal figures show that fewer than half of the coupons distributed have been redeemed, many of them expiring after their 90-day time limit.
The government can’t issue any more coupons until the ones already distributed expire, and consumers whose coupons expire can’t get replacements. Each address is limited to two coupons.
The coupon program has drawn hard criticism, but not as much as the converter-box industry it subsidizes.
“It was very confusing since there weren’t very many and the ones that were out there weren’t very good,” said Jesse Chettle, a track coach at Western State College in Gunnison who has a popular website that reviews converter boxes.
“Originally it was a certain function they lacked, but that got corrected,” he said, referring to a switch that allows users to watch non-digital signals as well. “It’s only now that the decent models are showing up just before the transition, and millions of people bought the other stuff.”
Despite it all, the pending switch is still being trumpeted by some as the greatest day in television history since the advent of the color set.
Subchannels to be available
One of the nicest aspects of digital TV will be the availability of additional channels. Not just more stations, but subchannels from the same station, such as 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 — up to six of them.
And it’s already started. Some public broadcast stations are offering standard programming on one, all-children formats on another and music on a third. At KBDI in Denver, there’s PBS at 12.1, documentaries on 12.2 and Worldview on 12.3.
“For the most part, people will get more channels than fewer,” said Shermaze Ingram, spokeswoman for the National Association of Broadcasters. “It’s really an opportunity for broadcasters to expand their program offerings.”
Digital signals are crisper and provide a nicer picture. But they suffer from a “cliff effect,” which means either you’ll see it or not. There are no ghosts or snow as with analog.
Trees, buildings, mountains, hills or any other obstructions affect an antenna’s ability to draw the signal. That’s why the FCC predicts thousands of viewers in the Denver area might not get any signal.
Rural communities are affected too, but in ways different from their big-city counterparts. For instance, those served directly by a high-power station such as those in Denver might find they’ve lost reception. That’s because many digital broadcasts don’t reach as far as the analog one did.
In other cases, it could be that the translator box that relays the broadcast to them hasn’t been upgraded to handle a digital signal.
In Wilmington, N.C., the first market to go all-digital in early September and a closely watched barometer of what the rest of the nation could expect, all went pretty well.
“About 14 percent of the over-the-air folks called,” said Connie Ledoux Book, an Elon University communications professor who supervised a call bank when the transition occurred. “Most of this was related to the signal strength. By the second day, stations reported only 12 calls.”
