All About Digital TV

There are a lot of questions surrounding the oncoming "Digital Switchover". People are running to their local electronics outlets to buy one of the illusive "digital boxes", hoping to stretch their analog televisions into the next decade. Unfortunately, this surge for a "solution" to the switchover has forgone any sort of explanation of what Digital TV actually is. It's not just a gimmick from your local Television station... nor is it a money-making scheme from the government, it's simply an upgrade to newer technology. Think about when Television began broadcasting in Color, you couldn't buy a converter to turn a grayscale TV to color!

The truth is, Digital Television has been around for awhile now. Most people will remember it was at least two years ago that cable companies started to offer "Digital Cable". Most people didn't bother to learn what that actually meant, all they knew was that this new technology would allow them to receive more channels and programming information over the same cable connection as the older analog technology, this was a good thing. If you have digital cable now, you already know what it's like to have Digital TV: The picture quality is improved, the quantity of programming is vastly improved, and new services can be offered through the higher bandwidth.
So if so many people already have digital TV, Then what's all the fuss about?

Well, for months now digital TV subscribers were living along side analog TV subscribers and it worked out because analog TV signals were simulcast (broadcast simultaneously) with Digital signals, so if you had an old analog tuner in your television, you still got the basics... But soon, the analog signals will stop coming in. Does this mean your old TV is useless? Well, no. If you have cable or Satellite TV, you probably already have digital TV, it just comes in over a wire instead of over the air, and you already have a converter box... you just call it the "cable box". If you don't have cable... well, you're going to need the converter, but there is good news: the government is giving out coupons!