Digital TV deadline set

FROM VARIETY: President signs law for analog to digital switch

By William Triplett -- Video Business, 2/9/2006

FEB. 9 | With a stroke of a pen, President Bush established February 2009 as the official and legally enforceable date for ending TV transmission as viewers and broadcasters have known it for decades.

The Budget Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, a package of legislation signed into law by Bush on Wednesday, contains provisions dictating steps in the federally mandated transition from analog to digital TV. One provision sets Feb. 17, 2009, as the cutoff date for analog signals.

Analog TVs, which account for the overwhelming majority of sets operating in U.S. households, will go dark if they are not connected to a cable or satellite provider that converts digital signals back to analog, or to a set-top converter box, which the industry is designing.

Another provision of the act earmarks some $1 billion to subsidize the estimated 20 million households that do not have cable or satellite and therefore will have to buy a set-top converter.

"CEA has long supported a hard cut-off date for analog broadcasts," said Consumer Electronics Assn. president-chief Gary Shapiro in a statement. "This deadline will provide certainty to manufacturers, retailers, consumers and all others with a stake in the transition."

Both the digital TV provisions and the overall legislative package lumbered slowly through both houses of Congress. The House approved the package late last year, and the Senate followed suit, but not before Senate Democrats forced some technical changes in the legislation. In turn, those changes forced the House to vote on the package again, which it did last week, approving it easily.

Other details of the digital TV transition, such as whether cablers will have to carry all channels that a broadcaster can digitally transmit, have yet to be resolved. The Senate Commerce Committee is expected to address those issues later this year.