Feb 06 2009
Digital TV switch confusion
So, you know how we’ve been hearing about this nationwide February 17th switch to digital TV signals for about, I don’t know, two years now? It is probably drilled into all of our heads and almost all of us are sick and tired of hearing about it. It appears that less than two weeks away from the switch, the FCC is saying, “JK! We’re not really ready for the switch, so we’re changing it to June 12″. I wonder if that’s going to cause any confusion.
Adding to the confusion, some TV stations are going to go ahead and switch on February 17th anyway. Those are mostly smaller or PBS stations who are turning off their analog transmitters earlier. It could include Channel 12 in Philly, but they are going to decide in the next couple of days. The rest of the Philadelphia stations will wait until June to switch. That means 4 more months of annoying commercials, probably made more annoying because they are correcting previously communicated information. At this point they should just switch over on some random day without telling people, that would keep us all on our toes.
