Switch to Digital Television Picking up Steam

Alioth writes "The long-anticipated switchover to purely digital TV began last night in Britain. Although digital broadcasts have been available for a while in most parts of the UK, they have been running alongside the old analogue frequencies. Last night, in the small hours, the analogue signal for BBC2 was switched off forever in the town of Whitehaven in Cumbria. Analog signals are expected to have been switched off over the whole of the UK by 2012. Meanwhile in the states Best Buy has stopped selling analog televisions. 'Best Buy is the first consumer-electronics retailer to report an exit from the analog-TV business. More than 60 million U.S. households currently rely on an antennas or analog cable, and cable operators are required to guarantee their customers will receive broadcast channels until February 2012.'"

Comments

Re:What are the benefits to consumers?

[tomstdenis]

What's wrong with attaching a digital receiver to your analogue tv? I mean Analogue TV just means the encoding of the signal. no reason a digital receiver couldn't output as component, svideo, or YBrCr [sp?]. If you bought a tv in the last 10 years that doesn't have component input, you either shop at the salvation army, or got ripped off. Hint: Most video game consoles have component outputs since the N64 days [and earlier]. That's more than 15 years ago.

Right now I have "digital cable" attached via component to my NTSC standard def TV. Works just fine. And it's hardly a fancy tv. I basically bought the first run of a mill 27" TV I saw.

Tom