"No one in the White House or Congress was paying much attention to how the conversion was going late last year," Gomery said. "And then as the deadline approached ... the folks in Washington suddenly realized they had underestimated how many people were affected."
By January, the $1.34 billion set aside for the coupons was gone. One of the first actions of the administration of President Barack Obama when it arrived Jan. 20 was to request a delay in the switch until June 17, when more funds and coupons could be made available.
Congress agreed two weeks ago, and Michael Copps, the acting chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, asked the largest stations in the nation if they would hold off until June.
The groups that agreed to hold off include stations owned by CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, Telemundo, Gannett and Hearst-Argyle.
"We wanted to do everything possible to give all viewers as much time as we could to get ready and make the transition so it's as seamless as possible," said Jay Newman, vice president and general manager of Baltimore's WJZ (Channel 13), a CBS-owned station.
Sinclair Broadcast Group of Hunt Valley, which owns or manages 58 stations in 35 markets, opted to stick to the original date. William Fanshawe, general manger of Sinclair's Baltimore stations WBFF (Channel 45) and WNUV (Channel 54), confirmed the switch, but he declined to comment further.
Fanshawe said the stations will shut down the analog signals at midnight tonight, but for the next two weeks, WBFF and WNUV will broadcast a message about how to make the transition.
Other Maryland stations that will pull the plug on their analog signals tonight include WBOC in Salisbury and WJLA in Hagerstown. The smaller the market, the harder it is to bear the additional cost of running analog signal, analysts say.
Still, the FCC forced 123 stations - most of them in smaller markets - to keep broadcasting in analog because they were deemed too important to their communities.
Gomery predicts that there will be two groups of people who could be "howling mad" when the analog signals disappears.
"The ones no one talks about too much are the kind of folks who live 50 miles outside Baltimore with a hill between them and the city," he says. "Maybe they don't watch much TV except for football and news, and so they have always put up with a fuzzy picture. Well, after midnight, they won't have even that, and they are not going to be happy about it."
