I am writing today to talk about the Digital Transition that is planned to take place on June 12, 2009, and all of what goes along with the transition.

There are lots of misconceptions about the transition, about how it effects customers, who it effects, why it is happening, and who it is benefiting. There are many subjects to discuss when talking about the transition and many questions that are often asked about it. The questions often asked include, "will everything be in high-definition after the transition?", "why are we doing it?", "who will benefit the most?", "do I need to buy all new TVs?", "I was told I have nothing to worry about, is this true?", and many more.

The truth is that while most people have been told it will not affect them, this is not entirely true. There are both positive and negative effects to the transition, and some will and some won't apply to everyone.

I will start with the misconceptions about the transition. I will go on to answer some of the questions that I posed, I will help explain the benefits that we will see from it, and I will give a history of our television transmission including what has transpired over the past 11 years.

Many people think that when the transition is completed, all broadcast television will be in High-Definition. This, unfortunately, is not true. While the networks are showing and creating more and more high-definition shows, there is no drop dead date when standard definition will go away. The fact is that there always will be standard definition content, as much of our old footage is still the same as when it was filmed. While there are processes that make our old footage look better, it does not convert anything filmed in standard definition into high-definition footage. (The exception to this is movies, as film has a much higher resolution potential than footage for television).

The question that still has a stigma to it is, "why are we doing it?" There could be several answers to this question, but let me start with one that should be the answer. When transmitting television through the air using the analog spectrum, there is a lot of wasted air waves. Analog usage does not maximize the utilization of its space. While cellphone technologies and other uses of the air waves become more prevalent, this wasted spectrum can be a detriment. Digital usage of the spectrum utilizes the airwaves in a much better manner, meaning we can transmit much more data through less space.

Once we free up air waves, what will happen to them? This is where the tricky answers come in. After the terrorist attacks in New York City, and later during Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast, it was apparent that first responders had no singular method for communicating with each other. Freeing up air waves allowed the federal government to allocate spectrum to first responders. It also sounded very good to the public who, at the time, were more than willing to give up many amenities and go through great expense to make life safer in the United States.

There was, however, ulterior motives for the transition. Since Americans were willing to spend some money to adjust their televisions to the digital age, the federal government saw an opportunity to create a new wave of wealth. The policy was put in place that Public Safety would be granted 20% of the air waves freed by shutting down the NTSC standard. The remaining 80% would be leased to telecommunications companies on a yearly basis, companies who saw cell-phone revenue increasing exponentially. To date, the Federal Government has received 19 billion dollars in auctions, and because the spectrum is just being leased, this is a continuing income. Not surprisingly, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon are the three top companies who have been granted usage of the spectrum.

Now that we understand the reasoning the federal government used to create the transition, who will it effect? The easy answer is that it will benefit us all when First Responders have a frequency to communicate. The harder answer is that it effects the low-class more than most everyone else. Those people that receive television without paying a monthly bill for the service, people who watch television using an antenna, are the greatest effected. While some say that should be the case because they get it for free while many others pay, the truth is that advertisers are the ones that pay for these free services. There was a time when people didn't believe in paying a cable bill because advertisers already paid the bill for the creation and broadcast of the material. We have just become more complacent to pay utility bills for channels that we will never watch.

If you receive television from a cable company or satellite company, you are less likely to see any problems. This is true because, as you may already know, whether your cable or satellite signal comes to your house digitally or analog, it is hard for the customer to see the difference. All satellite television is broadcast digitally, cable companies are still broadcasting using both. Why, if you are receiving analog cable from the cable company will the digital transition not effect you? Because the transition only effects the way that the networks send the signal out, not the way the pay services send it to their customers. This means that the expense is put on the network television stations and the cable and satellite companies. Those broadcast stations such as WDSU, WWL, and WVUE must drop the analog signal and be purely digital, in other words drop the NTSC standard and go strictly with ATSC standard (to be described later) on June 12, 2009. How much work will it take for them to prepare for this? The work has already been done by the local broadcasters. In fact, they were required by the FCC to transmit in both standards several years ago. The only change they are now required to make is to shut down the analog broadcast and field the angry calls from analog viewers.

How are the cable and satellite companies effected, then? They were not mandated to receive the signal digitally. Many kept receiving the signal from the network's analog broadcast, then would digitize it or leave it analog when sending it to their customers homes. Now that the analog signal is ending, they are required to receive the broadcast signals digitally. They can, however, continue to transmit the pay services however they please. Because cable companies analog signal is sent over a cable line, it does not take up air waves and thus does not effect the federal government's plans for the spectrum.

So, the fact is that the analog to digital conversion only effects those who receive the analog signals from the networks. If you receive your signal from anyone other than the local tower, be it satellite or cable, you should be unaffected.

There is a simple way to avoid interruption when the analog spectrum is shut down. This answer, while easy, has more far reaching effects than many will admit.

Companies began creating digital converter boxes. Many companies jumped into the industry, but some were unhappy to learn that the federal government had to approve the product in order for it to be eligible for the government's $40 coupon. Yes, the federal government created a coupon that you might have heard about. Every household address was eligible for two $40 coupons for digital converters. The converter is a small box which receives an ATSC signal through an antenna connected with a coaxial input, converts it to an NTSC signal, the kind of signal old analog television can see, and is released using one of several analog outputs on the box. The analog outputs on these converters only send standard definition signals.

What the government didn't tell people was that the coupons expired in 90 days from the date they were mailed. The coupons began being mailed about one year before the original transition date. There was an allotted amount of money for these coupons, based on the expectation of people still using antennas to receive television (about 20 million at the time). What the government didn't expect was that, due to their limited explanation of who needed the coupons, many more people when told about free coupons applied for them, depleting the budget allotted for the number of coupons. People that didn't need the coupons applied for them leaving the people who needed them, often the people with the least money and access to technology information, without the coupon.

Because the boxes only cost $50-$75 at retail, the possibility of people having to spend this in order to watch television is not the most scary prospect when compared to the cost of health care. The idea of going without the ability to watch television is sometime scarier to people than going without health insurance, as dangerous as that sounds.

So why is the transition dangerous in ways that people have not yet seen? The truth is that while most people pay for services that they are told do not need to prepare, most households still have analog televisions located somewhere. Some people have a television in a garage that doesn't have a cable line to it. Often people forget about these devices because they have the new LCD in the living room that they watch 99% of their television on. Some people run their television through an old VCR and tune the TV to channel 3. All tuners in VCRs will become obsolete when the transition is complete. My father always had a TV radio to listen to television stations when not near a television set. These will now be defunct.

More often than that, wherever you live, there always seems to be some natural disaster that can occur. Many people are prepared, whether it be for tornados, hurricanes, floods, blizzards, earthquakes, or anything else. Part of this preparation is to have a battery operated television. These battery operated televisions all rely on a built in antenna. Guess what? Not only are these now mostly defunct. There is only one battery operated digital converter box, and no one has pointed out the obvious need for these. Likewise, there are only a few battery operated digital televisions. If you would like a recommendation for a battery operated digital television, contact NOLA Smart Wire and we will recommend one to you. The point? Make sure you have a radio in the emergency preparation kit, because that traditional battery operated television is going to be useless.

While the reasoning for the transition was discussed earlier, the history of television also tells a story of why the transition is now here. Let me tell a little history and what is different about the new system compared to the old.

The analog spectrum of airwaves and how it is broadcast through the air was designed by the Nation Television System Committee (NTSC) in 1941 for black-and-white broadcasts. The NTSC group was formed by the FCC in 1940 to design the standard. Without getting too technical, the standard was set for 525 scan lines at 30 frames per second. These were two interlaced fields every 1/60th of second which constituted the whole picture drawn by the television every 1/30 of a second.

In 1950, the group got back together to set the new standard for color television. They did the amazing job of making the color-television standard backward-compatible with the black and white standard meaning that those with either kind of television were seeing the same broadcast, the only difference being that one saw color and the other didn't. The Tournament of Roses Parade was the first color broadcast on January 1st, 1954.

The NTSC standard remained, relatively untouched, for the next 44 years. Through times of technological innovation, television stagnated.

ATSC, the Advanced Television Systems Committee was formed in 1983, but did not get the new standard defined and approved until 1998. The ATSC standard was less a hard-law than NTSC, as they did not want to pigeon-hole themselves into a standard that immediately needed to be changed.

The ATSC created some abilities that NTSC did not have room for. One important change between the times of the NTSC is that there are now many formats to our televisions. During most of the reign of NTSC, Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) televisions were the type of television everyone produced. In modern times, there are CRT, LCD, Plasma, DLP, OLED, and various other technologies that handle signals differently. Almost all of the standards set with the NTSC were created to handle CRT sets. The newer technologies were designed to deal with the limitations of CRT sets rather than designed to take advantage of future specifications. NTSC standards established the aspect ration for all television at 4:3 or 1.33:1. This is the shape of televisions of the past. The ATSC standard did not create one aspect ratio, since they realized that many shapes can be made, 1.33:1, 1.78:1 (16X9), and even 2.35:1 (movie theaters often use this ratio). ATSC allowed for future changes to be made that would not be determined by their resolutions. For instance, when the ATSC standard was created, the typical resolutions for High-Definition television was 720p and 1080i, but 1080p was not a realistic expectation. The open-endedness of the new standard allowed television manufacturers to create technologies beyond that which was set by the ATSC.

While the Digital Transition has not been explained as well as it should have been, it utilizes the usage of our airwaves in ways that open both public safety to communicate and the federal government to cash in. As we have become so accustomed to doing, government has reason to get both our praise and blame simultaneously.

Jeremy Sauer