HDTV Deadline Looms (Feb 20, 2007)

Several years ago, President Bush signed into law new legislation that will ensure that, as of February 17, 2009, all TV stations in the United States will be required to broadcast programming using digital signals. The signing of this bill marks the final step in the complete phase out of all analog TV broadcasting.

Most of the TV and video recorders are hooked up to cable and set-top cable converters for TV sets, and such units will continue to be served an analog signal for who knows how many more years to come. When the analog to digital deadline passes, if you're still subscribing to analog cable, then your current TV and video recording units will continue to work, but if you don't have cable TV service and rely on the broadcast signals, then you would need to think about replacing them with units that can pick up digital TV signals.

The NTSC tuners as we have been using since the days of Milton Berle will continue to work with cable companies' analog broadband connections, but as of the 2009 deadline date, the NTSC tuners won't work with over-the-air transmissions of TV signals originating in the USA, though American cities close to Mexican cities can still pick up the analog signals of Mexican-licensed broadcasters such as XETV and XEWT from Tijuana with a NTSC tuner. There is no known deadline for Mexico to convert all of their analog TV signals to digital.

As for the video recorders, you can still subscribe to analog cable service to pick up some of the local broadcasters that they carry if you want to tape-delay shows for later viewing, but if you have no cable TV service, the FCC mandate will make sure that as of March 1, 2007, it requires that all TV sets sold in the US, as well as peripheral TV equipment such as VCRs and DVD recorders to be ATSC-compliant, meaning, that they must have a digital tuner that will pick up digital TV signals, all of which will support at least SDTV, or standard digital television broadcast signals. Not all digital TV tuners in TV sets and VCRs may also get HDTV resolution. Some sets get EDTV, which is better than SDTV, but it's not HDTV.

In order to aid Americans with this switchover, the signed bill allows for $1.5 billion to be set aside for subsidies toward DTV set top converter boxes that will, essentially, turn your old TV into a set that is able to receive digital broadcasting.