If you have TV sets that pull in stations through antennas, listen up. The federal government will give you two vouchers worth $40 apiece to buy converters to keep those sets from going dark when broadcasters switch from analog to digital signals in less than two years.
We don't know when the vouchers will be available, but when they are, sign up right away -- because there may not be enough to go around. If the government is going to take away the TV broadcasts you've been perfectly happy with, it might as well pay part of the cost to keep your set alive.
The $40 vouchers are the heart of a $1.5 billion switchover plan announced this week by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. This little-known agency has an unhappy job -- taking the sting out of a forced change in household technology that will turn politically toxic once millions of viewers figure out they've been had.
As part of a deal hatched by politicians, broadcasters and TV makers in the mid-1990s, the nation's TV stations are abandoning the analog transmission system they've used for over-the-air broadcasts since the 1940s.
They're replacing it with a new and incompatible digital transmission scheme that will provide them with more channels, including the capacity for high-definition broadcasts. The change will also force consumers to spend billions on new TVs, converters, antennas and other gadgets.
Most local stations are broadcasting in both formats today. But Congress has told broadcasters to cease their analog transmissions on Feb. 17, 2009.
That politically convenient date is just after the Super Bowl, but far enough ahead of the NCAA basketball tournament that lawmakers can skip town before millions of fans start to realize that they can't get digital broadcasts in their neighborhoods. But that's a subject for another column.
Analog sets that receive today's broadcasts over the air will stop working on that date -- unless they're equipped with a box containing a digital tuner that converts the new signal into an analog stream that the old TV can display. Many viewers may also need new antennas.
Cable or satellite providers will continue to give us analog signals our existing TVs can understand. So most of us won't be affected for years. But 19 million American households rely exclusively on over-the-air broadcasts. Presumably, their inhabitants either don't want cable -- or can't afford it. The latter are mostly poor and elderly, or both.
