Xigga

The FCC has mandated that all analog broadcasts be stopped by Feburary 2009.  How close is that?  About 7 months!  That’s half a year.  So for those who have standard definition TVs, you will be out of luck as you will not receive any signal to watch TV.    This was supposed to happen in 2007, but they realized that not a lot of people had HDTVs.

I heard about this in 2005 when I was working at CircuitCity.  The reason why they want to stop all broadcasts is to free up some of the air-wave frequencies.  Digital signals need a smaller frequency range than analog.  This way they can make better use of the unused frequencies.  So what if you don’t want to buy an HDTV?  Well you can buy a set-top box which will down-convert the digital signal to analog and you can watch your silly SDTV.

If you have cable or satellite, you won’t need to get an HDTV just yet.  It’ll be a few more years before they stop putting analog outputs on their boxes.