DTV transition: Some viewers losing signals

For marketing consultant Richard Kelleher, a transition from analog to digital television in the U.S. hasn't gone smoothly.

Kelleher, who lives in the Phoenix area, is one of millions of U.S. residents who have purchased converter boxes so that their television sets can receive digital broadcasts. U.S. televisions will stop broadcasting analog signals on Friday.

Kelleher received about 10 analog stations, and after hooking up the converter box, he receives only three stations, two of them Spanish-language stations, he said. "With the conversion, the government must be enforcing an agenda of teaching me Spanish," said Kelleher, who calls himself a marketing sociologist. "I live in northeast Phoenix, where there is a mountain range between my home and the [TV] station towers."

Most people receiving over-the-air broadcasts will need to purchase converter boxes to continue to receive TV signals after analog signals go dark Friday. The U.S. government continues to offer coupons to help with the cost of the US$50 to $80 converter boxes. Television sets hooked up to cable or satellite service will not need converter boxes.

With his TV set connected to the converter box, Kelleher gets a "station unavailable" message on several channels. He has an indoor antenna, and has no plans to crawl up on his townhouse roof to install an outdoor antenna, he said. He watches about two hours of TV a week and doesn't want to spend the money to buy cable service.

"Thank God for Internet," he said. "I'm paying the $40 for wireless broadband instead of cable. Most shows are on the Internet the next day."

Kelleher is not alone, according to DTV Across America, a group focused on providing information about the DTV transition. An estimated 2 million to 4 million U.S. households will lose TV signals Friday because they have not purchased a converter box, but others will lose stations because they lack an adequate outdoor antenna, the group said.

On Wednesday, Nielsen reported that 2.8 million American households, or 2.5 percent of the television market, are completely unready for the transition, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said. That's a big improvement over February, when the DTV transition was originally scheduled to happen, the agency said.

The FCC hasn't done an adequate job of describing the need for outdoor antennas, said Nicholas Didow, a spokesman for DTV Across America. The digital signals don't go through obstacles as well as the analog signals did, he said.

"There's not ready and then there's, 'I thought I was ready because I did what the FCC told me to do, but I still don't get much reception,'" Didow said. "In addition to these households [without converters] will be several million others who will be particularly surprised and frustrated, because they have done what the FCC told them to do -- bought a DTV converter box, maybe using the government coupons -- and they will find that this is inadequate as they also need to upgrade their antenna, or switch to cable or satellite."

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.