[Jeffhs]

In my area (northeastern Ohio) the cable operator is Time Warner (the company took over Comcast and Adelphia, at least in this area, a year or so ago). They have already converted their entire systems to digital, well in advance of the February 2009 analog cutoff, as one TW technician told me after I called the company following the first digital breakup on Cleveland's channel 3. Most of the time the reception is great, but every now and then the picture breaks up into unwatchable squares (pixelization)--even on analog sets. This has happened twice that I can remember since TW completed its digital conversion: once during NBC Nightly News a few months ago and again during a rerun of "Mama's Family" a couple nights ago on the local ION TV affiliate. The picture broke up and froze several times; this went on for about five or 10 minutes before the problem was finally identified and corrected. I would say that this is just due to the sheer newness (for want of a better phrase) of digital television to most people in the industry today; it will take a while to get all the bugs out so that such breakups and freezeups such as I just described will not happen again (or if they do occur, they will do so very rarely), once digital television becomes the TV standard just over 13 months from now.

BTW, someone recently mentioned in an earlier post that "...television is going away soon..." Not really. Television as we know it today will disappear in February 2009, but the medium itself will still be here, only in a new form. Where that person ever got the idea that TV is disappearing from the face of the earth forever is more than I know at this point. I think many people have been taken in by all the aggressive hype surrounding high-definition versus digital TV; remember the ads in the newspapers and magazines a few years back that said all televisions will "go black" in 2009, and everyone will have to get a new high-definition flat-panel TV because their old reliable analog sets would be worthless after a certain date in that year? I blush to admit that I fell for that hype hook, line and sinker, as I called my cable company and had my service upgraded to digital not long after it started. I wish I had known then what I know now about digital and HD TV: that standard analog sets will still be usable well beyond the February 2009 analog shutoff deadline if you have cable, satellite or a set-top box (STB) ahead of your TV for over-the-air reception with an antenna. The point I'm trying to make is that no one will need an expensive flat-panel TV to continue receiving their area's local channels after the analog stations go off the air, although, of course, a plasma or LCD FP will be necessary if you want to see the digital broadcasts in high definition. If you simply want to continue to receive your local stations digitally and don't mind the picture being in letterbox format, digital cable/satellite or an OTA STB and an antenna ahead of your current analog set will fill the bill very nicely. I think many people will do just that, especially if they have an analog TV that works well; the same articles and ads that said analog TVs would be worthless in 2009 also mentioned a nightmare scenario in which millions of analog televisions would appear on curbs across the country once analog TV disappeared, as people replaced those sets with plasma or LCD flat-panels in droves. Again, not so, but that's the advertising business for you. It has been said you cannot believe everything you see in the papers or on TV, and advertising is like that as well. I think the reason all this pull-out-all-the-stops high-powered stuff appears is because advertisers simply want to sell (in this case) high-definition TVs and will stop at nothing to do so, even if the advertising isn't 100-percent true. The hype surrounding high-definition television several years ago, especially the talk about analog sets being useless after 2009, probably started simply because no one really knew much about the new method of TV transmission when it was first announced that American television would switch to digital (not necessarily HD) in 2009. The cutoff was supposed to have been some time in 2006, then was postponed until 2009. We are just 13 months away from what one of Cleveland's TV stations (CBS 19) refers to, on its website, "The Big Switch", and once that happens, there will be no turning back.

I am actually looking forward to the end of analog TV. I think it will be interesting to see what effects digital and high-definition will have on a television system pioneered by RCA over five decades ago. It has been said that the digital switchover is the biggest thing to happen to television since color and even stereo TV sound; we'll just have to wait and see.