Big "white out" snowstorm coming, ...

by SamCogar Tue Jan 01, 2008 6:06 am

Will it affect you?

Better TV is coming, but are you ready for it?

The digital dilemma: Disappearance of analog signals just a year away

Behind the placid pictures, a made-for-TV storm is looming.

Since the first days of television, the method of beaming pictures into our living rooms hasn’t changed much. But on Feb. 17, 2009, television stations across the country will hit the off button on this time-tested technology and switch to new transmitters, sending computerized digital signals through the air.

When the change comes, the estimated 30 million televisions that use traditional antennas will go to snow without a digital converter box. The cable industry is spending $200 million to educate customers, and Congress has set aside $1.5 billion to help subsidize the purchase of converter boxes.

Still, half of American viewers don’t know the storm is coming, according to a poll conducted last month by the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing. For the 1 in 5 American households that still use rabbit ears or antennas on the roof, “the day of reckoning is coming,” said Barry Umansky, a communications professor at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.

Televisions aren’t the only technology to use analog signals. Some cell phone customers still use analog service, which carriers won’t have to provide under a similar ruling that takes effect Jan. 1. So do about 1 million home and business alarm systems across the country, many of which are small, local operations for which the switch to digital could be prohibitively expensive.

“So you could have your alarm going off and the signal will go nowhere — basically fall on deaf ears,” (Just like Hillary Clinton messages geek

) said Andrew Stevens of Tele-Plus, a telecommunications and security company in Hagerstown, Md.

Likewise, General Motors’ OnStar automotive assistance service will go silent in all models that can’t be upgraded to receive digital signals. That’s every model made before 2002, as well as some made from 2002 to 2004.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22401907/