Broadcast DTV and the upcoming turn-off of analog broadcasts

I'm somewhat amused at the state of affairs in consumer electronics related to the upcoming shutdown of analog broadcast TV. The FCC has decided that we should all get the benefits of digital television and so has ordered the shutdown of analog television broadcasts. Actually they want to get rid of analog broadcast television because digitial television offers much more and is far more bandwidth efficient. In fact the broadcasters will get a benefit out of this as well as broadcast digital television requires far less power and televisions spend a large amount of money on electricity.

So why am I amused? Well the original date for the complete switch to digital television (DTV) was the end of 2006, but that has already been pushed out for a number of reasons. This is funny in of itself in that the decision to move to digital broadcasting was made nearly a decade ago. Is this going to be another one of those transitions like adopting the metric system? My cut at it is that it is caused be several factors, although I think the primary blame falls squarely on the consumer electronics companies.

For most people in the United States, watching a DTV signal is going to require the purchase of some equipment. At a minimum a DTV receiver is necessary as the hundreds of millions of existing analog television sets aren't going to be able to receive a digital signal. These receivers are often called set top boxes as they'll be somewhat like a cable box or satellite box. But try to buy one of these devices right now. My family tried to buy me one for Christmas and the one store that thought they knew something sold them an antenna! Yeah for consumer electronics sales people. They are so clueless about this technology and what's needed that it would laughable if it wasn't so sad. Add to this that there are not many set top boxes available and only a few consumer electronics stores in the area carry them, how is the average consumer ever going to get this sorted out? Oh, and to further complicate things, I suspect most consumers who bought an HDTV think they are reawdy for all this. Well it ain't so. The majority of HDTV sets people are buying are HDTV ready. All this means is that if they are given an already received HDTV signal, they can display it. So without a set top box, they won't see broadcast channels when the analog signals are shut off. This has all the earmarks of being another "metric adoption" fiasco.