Unofficial DTV Transition Going Down Tonight

As we discussed last week, one of the odd side effects of the recent legislation extending the digital TV transition from Feb. 17th to June 12th is that Congress gave many of the nation's broadcasters the option to cut over on the original date anyway. There's now a confirmed number on how many exactly we're talking about and it's not small -- 421 stations nationwide will cease analog broadcasting at 11:59PM tonight. When you add in the 220 that have already done so, 641 of the nation's 1,800 local broadcast stations will be digital-only at midnight tonight, or about 36% according to the FCC and TWICE. 

At first glance, this seemed odd to me. The justification for delaying the DTV cutover was that some percentage of U.S. households aren't ready yet. But by letting some broadcasters shut off the analog signals today, what is the message from the FCC? Apparently what the Commission has done is try to have at least one of the "Big 4" network affiliates (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) in each market continue to broadcast in analog so that households not yet ready for all-digital will still be able to get local news and emergency information. This explains why here in San Diego, four of the five major networks (counting The CW) will go digital-only tonight while the local NBC affiliate will continue its analog broadcast.

This whole thing is a bit of a mess, especially considering there are still boatloads of people on waiting lists for the government's DTV coupon. Here's hoping this thing gets sorted out in the next couple of months so that we're not in this same position the week before June 12th...