Why Switch To Digital TV Will Leave Millions Behind

Last week both the house and senate passed a bill which the president has already signed to extend the date from which anonlog tv makes the switch over to digital from february 17th 2009 to June 12th. Despite this change of date some channels are planning to go right ahead and make the switch over to digital on february 17th as planned anyway. No matter what the date it is likely not going to make much of a difference for millions of tv viewers who still get their signals over the air and watch tv on anolog sets. The F.C.C. estimates that there are about 6 million households nationwide (thats about 10% of the viewing public) for whom anolog over the air viewing is their only means of watching tv and for many of them it is the only viable way. Many rural areas of the country are simply not hooked up to cable and so there is no service and therefore no option to switch over to cable even if they both wanted to or could afford to start paying for tv, which is something that they have not traditionally done before. These people may in effect be left out in the cold.
The virtues of DTV have been tallied for months now. The superior picture quality and sound have been used by proponents of the switch to promote it and get the viewing public to embrace this change. One thing they usually wont tell you about is how fragile the signal sometimes is. DTV does not work like analog. Analog is a stronger signal generally than the signals that are sent out by digital transmissions. On an analog channel even if the signal is weak or less than perfect the likely result is that the picture will be fuzzy or slightly out of focus or even have some snow on it but it will usually be viewable. On digital there are only two possibilities. The picture will either be there or it wont. If the signal is strong enough the picture will be there if it isint your tv will display a box that indicates that there is no signal and the screen will be black, there is usually no in between. The signal can also be effected by weather. If it is very windy for example the signal may disappear on your set and you will have to rescan the entire digital spectrum in order to retrieve it. All these factors will of course depend on how strong the signal is coming from the station broadcasting it. This is still very spotty and varies from region to region in the country. In some areas it is not going to matter what you do. You could even install an antenna on top of your roof to pick up signals and it still may not help because some stations signals are still going to be too weak based on where you live and you are just going to be out of luck.
The other selling point about digital TV is the increased number of channels that will be offered for free. It's called "multicasting" and what it means is that every individual station will be able to broadcast multiple channels at the same time and offer more viewing options to the public. For example, if you watch channel 5 on your tv you will notice that there will be also a channel 5.1 and 5.2 and so on. These additional channels will have different programs running at the same time from the same station and you will no longer be limited to having just one channel and one program running at a time. This is a great idea if only these stations had something to put on these extra channels that was worth watching. Channel 5 in new york, which is the local FOX station is multicasting already as are most of the channels here. On channel 5.1 it runs its usual Fox lineup of shows. On channel 5.2 it runs a channel that it also owns called MY9. If you switch to channel 9.1 you will see all the usual shows that run on MY9. If you switch to channel 9.2 you get the Fox station. The local ABC affiliate channel 7 runs an all day weather channel on its multicast. The local NBC station runs high school swimming meets and tack meets all the time. Simply put you will have more channels if you can pick them up that is but you are going to be more bored than ever. Its a lot like that old Springsteen song, "57 channels and nothing on."
Like it or not the change is gonna come and it will be permanent soon. Lets hope that the people behind it can get their act together and boost up those signals so that everyone can pick them up from a technological standpiont and lets also hope that they can find it in their hearts to put something on worth watching from a programming standpoint. I know im hoping against hope on both of these things but i cant help but keep hoping.