Tuesday, February 17, 2009

It's Feb. 18. Tell Your Analog Shutdown Stories Here.

It's now Feb. 18 (despite what the date/time of the post says, that's when I started writing), what was supposed to be The Day After the digital TV transition, the first day of the post-analog era. That was until the DTV Delay Act pushed the transition back to June 12.

But in many TV markets, a fair number of stations are now gone, thanks to the early termination procedures set down by the FCC. According to the final FCC count released on the 16th, the number of stations that had dropped their regular analog programming before the 17th had risen to 220, supplemented by 421 yesterday, for a total of 641 (13 more than in my previous post).

Please note that many of the 421 aren't going completely blank, but will be continuing in "nightlight" mode (broadcasting local news plus DTV education videos) for a period ranging between a couple of weeks and a couple of months. This should ease the confusion of people who might otherwise conclude that their TV was broken.

What I would like to do is find out what the situation is in your area. How many stations have dropped analog altogether, how many are in "nightlight" mode and how many are unaffected so far? Has your local media run any stories on this? Do you know people who were caught off-guard (friends, family, co-workers)? Anyone you know (or you yourself) disappointed with your area's digital reception?

I plan to do a follow-up post sometime Thursday trying to summarize what's known at that time, and will reflect your input as best I can. See you then!

3 Comments:

At 4:15 AM, Blogger John said...

Thanks for your ongoing clarity in writing about the DTV transition amidst a general lack of same in the popular media. Good thing we're talking about some people's televisions abruptly losing function rather than, say, their implantable defibrillators, I'm thinking. It will be interesting to hear how things further transpire...

 
At 6:56 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Orlando/Daytona Beach market:

Pre-February 18 shutdowns:

WACX (former analog 55, DTV 40) (Religious) (Switched quite some time ago)
WDSC (former analog 15, DTV 33) (PBS) (Switched early due to xmtr failure)
WBCC (former analog 68, DTV 30) (PBS) (Switched early due to xmtr failure)

Analog newly killed as of today:

WMFE (analog 24, DTV 23) (PBS)
WVEN (analog 26, DTV 49) (Univision)
WTGL (analog 45, DTV 46) (Religious)
WRDQ (analog 27, temp DTV 14, final DTV 27) (Independent)

The latter (WRDQ) is "nightlighting" with a static graphic.

Left churning out NTSC signals for awhile longer are WESH, WKMG, WFTV, WKCF, WOFL, WOTF, WHLV, WOPX, and WRBW.

 
At 11:50 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

St. Louis Market:

All the main UHF stations have gone digital-only, but the VHF stations are still analog.

Digital-only:

KNLC 24 (Religious)
KDNL 30 (ABC)
WRBU 46 (MyNetwork)

Analog:

KTVI 2 (Fox)
KMOV 4 (CBS)
KSDK 5 (NBC)
KETC 9 (PBS)
KPLR 11 (CW)

The only one of these that dropped analog last night is KDNL, which is nightlighting with a pair of DTV videos (one spanish, one english). KDNL never had a local news broadcast, so the DTV videos are all they have up, I believe.

There are some UHF low-power stations with shopping club stuff still on them, I think, but I never watch those and they are blanked out on my channel list.

Slightly off-topic, but the Fox affiliate had their local news broadcast go hi-def last week, and were the last local TV news source to do so. From what I can see none of the stations can quite figure out how to make up/light the newsreaders' faces for hi-def; awful lots of wrinkles showing now. (The national broadcasts seem to have a better handle on this.)

 

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