Roughly 36 percent of U.S. television stations have already gone completely digital, eschewing the four extra months of analog over-the-air broadcast time allowed by the government.
This percentage includes 421 stations that turned off their analog signals on Tuesday, plus 200 more that had switched to digital, the New York Times reports. All stations were scheduled to shut off their analog signals yesterday until lawmakers passed a bill extending the DTV changover to June 12.
The delay hasn't stopped a sizeable portion of stations from making the change early, even if doing so alienates people who were resting easy after President Barack Obama signed the bill into law. It's cheaper for stations to broadcast solely the digital signal, and the delay doesn't require them to wait. The Times reports that mostly smaller markets made the switch on Tuesday. The largest among them was San Diego, where 7 percent of residents get their television over the air.
Nielsen Media Research estimates that 5.1 percent of households across the country aren't DTV-ready yet. The delay was meant to buy more time, as there is a shortage of $40 coupons to digital converter boxes. An economic stimulus package, signed yesterday by Obama, includes $650 million for this purpose.
In the meantime, the Federal Communications Commission is trying to ensure that at least one of the major four networks -- ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC -- stay analog in each market until June, but it's not clear whether that will happen in all markets.
The commission is mostly concerned with getting news and other information out in case of an emergency, so it's not just a matter of broadcasting every episode of your favorite TV show. However, that does seem to be a big driver; the Wall Street Journal reports that Tuesday saw a frenzy of converter box purchases in the markets that dropped analog.
