Videomaker Gives up Predicting Analog Transmission Deadline

Ok. We give up officially. The deadline for TV stations to abandon their analog broadcast channels was Feb 17th, then it wasn’t, then it was again, now it’s kinda June 12th if your local station wants to.

The latest bill that passed sent the drop-dead date out until June 12th, 2009. However most, if not all, analog broadcast stations were geared up to pull the switch on Feb 17th. Lawmakers are concerned that television viewers aren’t ready to make the switch yet,  and that there was a large unfilled backlog of digital converter coupons still left to be sent out.

The problem for TV stations is that it’s pretty expensive to run those analog transmitters, and they already have the new digital transmitters ready to go. So they’ve allowed stations to make the change any time they want between Feb 17th, and June 12th. Which means the transfer will happen in a piece-meal fashion over the next 4 months, with some analog and some digital channels overlapping.

I’m wondering if the Congress tried really hard, they could make this transition even more confusing?

In the meantime, we’ve given up following this story, and instead I’ll just let you know when my TV is working, and you can follow the FCC website daily.