Originally published July 20 2005
The digital television shift
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
As federal policymakers wrangle over a deadline to switch from analog to digital television, nearly four out of 10 U.S. households rely on over-the-air analog TV signals. Millions of old TV sets will be affected by the digital TV transition.
Just last week, two major consumer groups predicted that nearly four out of 10 U.S. households have at least one TV set that relies on over-the-air analog TV signals.
While the consumer electronics industry has called that number inflated, one thing seems certain: Millions of old TV sets will be affected by the digital TV transition.
For more than 50 years, analog television has used continuously changing frequencies and voltage levels to send pictures and sound over radio waves.
The problem is that analog waves often degrade on their way to your TV set, which creates interference.
Digital technology, however, uses encoded streams of zeros and ones to send information to TV antennas, largely eliminating interference and degradation.
Digital signals can also pack more information into a smaller space, allowing broadcasters to provide HDTV or even embed other data in the stream.
Federal authorities have let the TV stations broadcast in both analog and digital over a number of years to give new digital TV sets a chance to make their way into the nation's living rooms.
At some point, the broadcasters will give back the old analog spectrum so the government can auction it off for advanced wireless services and use portions for public-safety applications.
Digital TV, or DTV, consists of 18 different formats, of which only two are widely considered to be high-definition.
According to the National Association of Broadcasters, 1,497 stations in 211 regions are currently transmitting digital signals.
But because no one can agree on how to measure that 85 percent standard, few Washington insiders ever expected the 2006 date to stick.
As a result, leaders in Congress have been talking about a "hard deadline" of Dec. 31, 2008, at which time analog signals would go dark regardless of how many people can receive digital transmissions.
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