Two days after being voted down by the U.S. House of Representatives a bill to delay the transition to digital television came back to life in the U.S. Senate. The Senate today passed a bill delaying the DTV switch until June. It now goes back to the House, where it may not come up for a vote until late next week.Without an extension, in just weeks television as we know it will undergo a dramatic transition as broadcasters turn off their analog signals for good and American TV goes fully digital.
Even assuming everyone does get a converter box in time for the changeover, it’s still not clear exactly what’s going to happen when analog finally goes dark.
Last February market research firm Centris concluded that due to distance limitations of digital signals and interference known as “multipath,” a significant number of households will lose channels with the transition. Those with the highest risk of seeing a black screen are households that rely on indoor antennas – such as the combination UHF/VHF “rabbit ears” many of us grew up with.
Government estimates put the number of American households that have at least one TV receiving over-the-air analog signals at roughly 35 million, and Centris estimates as much as 70 percent of them rely on indoor antennas.
The shortcomings of DTV reception via indoor antennas have been common knowledge since at least 1999, when Sinclair Broadcasting Group challenged the dominant DTV standard – known as “8-VSB” -- calling it inadequate for the delivery of reliable over-the-air service to simple indoor antennas. The FCC overruled Sinclair’s objections, and the company says advances in DTV receiver chipsets have since helped mitigate the problem. But some engineers say the problems are far from fixed.
“For the people with rabbit-ear antennas, I would say at least 50 percent won’t get [all] the channels they were getting,” said Dr. Oded Bendov an engineer, industry consultant and president of TV Transmission Antenna Group, Inc. Bendov, who has conducted several studies on DTV reception and was hired to replace the antennas on the Empire State Building, says he could “write a book on all the ways the FCC botched the DTV project.”
“Between over-prediction of how far the DTV service will extend and underestimating the real-world reception problems of DTV, the FCC achieved on paper the replication of the analog TV service that TV broadcasters had insisted upon. But that accomplishment is only on paper,” he said.
Here’s why: Those of us accustomed to watching analog television know that not every channel comes in crystal clear; that’s been an acceptable tradeoff for people who don’t watch enough television to justify paying for cable or satellite or those who are simply content with the programming choices available on network TV. But while analog television offers grades of clarity – ranging from crystal clear to a screen full of snow and everything in between, digital, by its very nature, is an ‘all or nothing’ technology: you either get a channel perfectly or you don’t get it at all.
That means some channels that were perfectly watchable via analog will disappear completely with digital.
Besides converter box manufacturers and broadcasters, it’s hard to see who benefits (except maybe cable companies, which expect to see a surge in new subscribers who are unable to receive digital signals.)
