The Digital Divide…

No Dear Reader this is not a sop article on the travails of some community still using dialup. Its the ditigal divide going from analog to digital on the airwaves of TV land. –

For the next year, you will hear repeated public service messages about analog television service being elminated on February 17, 2009. It will be replaced by digital TV service (DTV), and all TV stations will only broadcast in digital format. The problem: what if you only have an old-fashioned TV? Will it go black a year from now?

Easy answer: it might if you get your signal using rabbit ears or an old-fashioned antenna. The solution: get a digital converter box that will take the new digital signals and convert them back to analog. To help with the expense of buying these boxes, Uncle Sam has set up a coupon program to offer each household up to two $40 coupons toward the purchase of digital TV converter boxes.

The whole situation is so screwed up that it could be safely said that the adoption of 700mhz digital space will be delayed irrespective of the outcome of auction #73. This is the kind of bureaucratic bungling we come to expect from Washington.

Read the whole thing over at Mouse Print.