The Great Digital TV Switchover

Well, we've finally made the "great switchover" to digital television. It seems to have gone off pretty well.

This was supposed to have taken place months ago, but due to the usual ineptness of the government (they ran out of discount vouchers) and a lot of knuckleheaded people, the switchover was delayed to June 12.

For me, since I really don't watch that much television, I don't bother subscribing to either cable or satellite television (if I had do, I'd go with satellite). My television set is a little older, so I needed to get a converter box. As I got my voucher in early December, before the government ran out of them, I got my converter box in early January and it just sat on a shelf until yesterday.

While having my usual Saturday brunch at my local Crazy Tokyo Sushi restaurant, I overheard another patron talking about the problems with his converter box. He had trouble scanning for channels and the coaxial cable broke on the end that plugs into the box and he couldn't get it off to return the converter to the dealer. I thought, "I hope I don't have the same problems as he did."

Well, I hooked everything up (one must follow the directions to avoid problems) and everything went quite well. The converter scanned as it was supposed to and all the channels came through crystal-clear (I did notice the usual pixelations here and there that's inherent to digital broadcasts). And, the converter box came with batteries for the remote! (Great. Now I have another friggin' remote to deal with as I already have one for my home theater system, one for my TV, one for my VCR and one for my DVD player.)

While flipping through the stations to see what new ones are now available, I came across one called "This" (I'm surprised there's not another channel called "That"). It was in the middle of an old 1950s sci-fi flick, "The Monster That Challenged The World" featuring Hans Conried (of "Fractured Flickers" fame of the 1960s). It seems to specialize in horror and sci-fi movies from what I can tell (I saw no listings for "This" anywhere) as I later took another look and another horror movie was on (don't know what it was). The other stations seemed to be a slew of ethnic-oriented stations: Latin, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, etc. (Welcome to the great melting pot!) There was also added a weather channel for local weather reports. At least that's useful!

Ah, well. Welcome to the 21st Century of digital television.

UPDATE: It was pointed out to me (correctly) that the converter box does not provide HD to analog televisions, but instead allows analog television sets to receive and show digital broadcasts. There is a lot of confusion over this, and since I really didn't pay too much attention to it, I also had the terms wrong. Also, the converter box and its instruction manual also says "Digital To Analog TV Signal Converter" and, also, it says "Access HD." I made the changes above accordingly.