Will the analog shutoff affect you?
By Ben Drawbaugh 
posted Feb 6th 2006 9:26AM
posted Feb 6th 2006 9:26AM
It's estimated that 20 million households rely solely on
free OTA television, the rest of Americans have either cable or satellite. The digital transition will only affect
people who don't have cable or satellite right, or will it? I wonder how many Americans have cable TV, but don't use a
STB or how many satellite subscribers don't pay extra for locals. If you consider the expensive bandwidth the analog SD
(38Mbps) channels take up on cable networks, it would be surprising if the cable companies will want to continue to
carry the analog versions. That is assuming that the local affiliates allow them to convert the digital feeds to
analog. Most of this has not been decided and is already starting to spark up heated
debates between cable companies and members of the NAB. Would the cable companies
force all their customers to subscribe to digital cable? Will the government-subsidized STBs be available to cable and
DBS subscribers? This is starting to look like it's going to affect more people than just those who rely solely on free
OTA TV. At this point you are either saying wow or this won't effect me, but have you thought about portable TVs, or TVs in your car or RV, the TV in the garage or the one you take to tailgate? I would think that everyone who loves HD is anxiously waiting for the analog shutoff, but there are many questions to answer in the next three years.
Will the analog shutoff affect me?
We only have one analog TV right now, if it blows till then (it's already about 10 years old) it probably won't. I would still like to get one of those converters anyway. You never know if it would come in handy!
I will be affected as I am currently getting an analog signal of dish network through Grande Communications. I don't know if Grande will force us to move to Digital Cable, but the quality I get out of the "analog" signal is terrible. I would prefer to have an uncompressed analog signal but I can't get one where I live. Everythin gthat is digital is so compressed I can't watch it. Perhaps if I had HD it would be different too.
My inlaws live way out in the middle of nowhere and can receive signals from both Dallas and Waco through a large antenna. They also have dish network but do not have local channels due to their location. They will probably just opt to pay a little extra a month for "local" channels or they will get a converter for the OTA signal.