In light of the upcoming (or so we hope) transition to digital television, I thought I might fill in some of the blanks for anyone who is a bit confused about what exactly is happening.

The Federal Communications Commission originally planned to cut broadcasting of basic cable on Feb. 17; the switchover has since been delayed until June.

You know that thing on top of your house that looks like a giant clothes hanger? That’s how people used to get their basic cable before satellite and Cablevision.

The plan is to wipe out the analog broadcasting and only transmit TV through digital means -aka your cable box. These ‘converter’ boxes that we’ve all seen commercials for will take the digital-only signal and convert it to analog for all you people still in the Stone Age with your non-flat-screen TVs and ColecoVisions.

So then what’s the point of this? Why change a system we know works? Because digital television is simply more robust. It allows for more than a 100 percent increase in the number of channels being broadcast and allows for higher quality pictures and sounds. HDTV anyone?

If any of you have been paying attention to this so-called transition, you’ll know that it hasn’t been very widely accepted. In fact, the National Association of Broadcasters doesn’t think that broadcasters are ready yet for the switchover – hence the delay.

One of the biggest reasons this transition hasn’t happened sooner is the fact that the FCC will have a new problem to deal with after they trash analog television. Moving to DTV frees up the airwaves that were previously used for analog TV. So what do we do with it?

Free nationwide Wi-Fi anyone?

Most of you have probably heard of 3G broadband networks. Well, the FCC has auctioned off the free space to carriers such as Verizon and AT&T to provide a much faster and nationwide network which has been dubbed the ‘4G’ network by some. Of course there is much more to the division of space, but I’ll spare you the techno mumbo jumbo as much as possible.

This ‘free Wi-Fi’ is only a benefit of moving to digital. The primary reason for pushing this transition is that analog TV isn’t really going anywhere. There really is no incentive to move to digital, and most people either don’t know the difference or don’t care.

Today, with the number of people who even watch broadcast television dropping due to online TV providers like Hulu.com, broadcasters needed something to push users to start watching more TV. Hopefully providing a change to the previous television environment might get people away from YouTube and back onto that La-Z-Boy, located right in front of that nice 56-inch flat-screen TV.

Oh wait, you don’t have one – the FCC will get right on that.

Matthew Bellezza is a senior information management technology major. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at mlbellez@syr.edu.

Published on February 16, 2009 at 12:00 pm