Test of Digital TV Conversion Not Quite Smooth

There’s a news service story out reporting on a recent test of the changeover to digital broadcast television scheduled for next February.   Broadcasters in Wilmington, North Carolina volunteered to be guinea pigs by accelerating the transition to a couple of weeks ago.  The story concerns what happened:

Of the 1,828 people who complained to the Federal Communications Commission in the first five days, slightly more than half of them were unable to tune in one or more channels.[…]

The largest number of calls to the FCC were from viewers of the NBC affiliate, WECT-TV. That station’s analog broadcast covers far more ground than its digital signal, meaning some viewers could watch that channel before the switchover but not afterward. A total of 553 complaints were attributed to that issue.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said a smaller digital footprint may affect as many as 15 percent of television markets in the U.S.

Nielsen Co. said as of July that there are about 13.4 million television households in the U.S. that receive their programming over the air only, about 12 percent of all homes with TVs. In Wilmington, the total is 15,110, or 8.4 percent.[…]

If the Wilmington complaint rate were applied nationally, there would be more than 1.1 million calls to the FCC in the first five days after the change.

I don’t know about you, but even with the small amount of television I watch, I feel like I’ve been deluged with dire warnings about February’s transition.  At some point, don’t you have to just take the training wheels off the bicycle?