The Digital TV Transition: A Rocky Start

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The FCC says many other stations are asking for permission to be given extra power for their signals, a process that involves negotiating with neighboring stations that could be affected by the interference.

Some rural viewers are left in the dark, not for lack of preparation, but because they are situated too far from where signals originate. Colombo, an electrical engineering student at the University of Virginia, is an aficionado of over-the-air TV who gives advice on Web forums about setting up digital converters. His problem? His home in Charlotte County, Va., is 80 miles from the Roanoke station that beams the signal. "He probably should never have been getting that station anyway," says FCC spokesman Rick Kaplan. "If he was getting it [before the transition], he was lucky."

Confused and error-prone consumers

In urban areas, by contrast, some users don't get their favorite shows because of tall buildings. Brooke Spectorsky, general manager of Cleveland NBC-affiliate, WKYC (GE), can't even watch his own over-the-air broadcasts. "We are not able to get our own channel from off-the-air inside the building," says Spectorsky, whose offices are located in midtown Cleveland. Before the transition the analog channel was snowy, but watchable.

The FCC says that many problems being reported stemmed from a lack of preparation or awareness by consumers. Some didn't purchase the correct antennas. Others didn't position them properly. Some antennas marketed as "digital antennas," are actually able to receive only one of the two signals over which digital programming is broadcast. In order to get a full range of channels, an antenna must be able to receive both UHF and VHF signals.

In some cases, the glitches boil down to the direction in which an antenna is pointing. With an analog signal, the viewer is guided in the right direction by the crispness of a picture. But digital signals have what's known as a "cliff effect:" The show is either clear or it's gone altogether, making it difficult to point the antenna by watching what appears on the screen.

Another common problem, according to Knapp, is that some converter boxes may still be linked to old analog signals, a problem that can be solved by resetting the box so that it scans for a new signal—though this process can be difficult to master, requiring multiple steps. "It takes 20 minutes to explain this," Spectorsky says. WKYC has run a help line to assist viewers in setting up converter boxes. "It's a fairly complicated process—especially for an elderly person whose son-in-law might have hooked up the box to start with," he says.

As rocky as the transition has been, it would have been a lot worse had the four-month extension not been granted, says Joel Kelsey, policy analyst for Consumer's Union, a consumer advocacy group that urged the Obama Administration to delay the transition. The group cited holdups with the government's converter box coupon program, as well as a disjointed public education campaign. "There are still many millions of homes without all their channels, but we are in a much better (situation) than we were in February," Kelsey says. "Although analog broadcast came to an end, we are still going through a transition in this country that will take time."

Schectman is a reporter at BusinessWeek.

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