Last week, we were supposed to be closing the coffin of analog television and lowering it into the ground. Digital television (DTV) broadcasts, underway for a decade in an ever-increasing fashion, were supposed to take over entirely on Feb. 17, 2009. The failure of an obscure government agency to manage a coupon program that would have helped smooth the transition for those most in need of television as a lifeline for information and, yes, for entertainment, shows just how deeply divided the country remains over digital issues.

What’s the fuss? As many as 20 million U.S. households remain wedded to analog TV broadcasts even as the deadline for the DTV-only transition passed. These homes still receive all their TV via antenna, and rely on it for news, entertainment, and emergency broadcasts (seemingly a regular occurrence around the country).  

If you’re black, Hispanic, poor, or rural, or any combination of the three, your TV is way more likely to stop working than if you’re middle class, urban, or white. A big surprise, right?

The government organized an information campaign coupled with a coupon program to allow analog TV owners to get convertors for from about $0 to $10 after the voucher was applied that would let them use the same set to get DTV. The program, however, wasn’t well thought-out, despite being years in the making. It ran out of money temporarily, and the people who needed the coupon program most were those least likely to understand it or know about. And, honestly, do you want to explain to your 80-year-old grandmother how to upgrade her 1970-era tube TV to get digital signals? She doesn’t even have a remote control.

This transition is all about our bumpy road to the all-digital age, something we went through to a lesser extent when analog cellular networks were turned off. But it’s also about the billions of dollars buried in analog spectrum when it’s freed to work for digital: Congress discovered in the 1990s that spectrum auctions bring in piles of cash. Spectrum is scarce, however, with good radio frequencies all being in use. Transitions from inefficient analog to better digital free up frequencies for sale.

The public good went by the wayside in the interest of serving many masters. The public doesn’t per se need DTV. DTV has benefits of the quality of the signal, the quantity of simultaneous broadcasts, and the efficiency that digital brings to spectrum use. But it’s not like analog broadcasts suddenly broke. Rather, many kinds of industries wanted DTV to come about, and the sausage didn’t stay in the casing while the transition was being ground out.

Let’s look first at the technological justification for a DTV transition, which is reasonable enough, excluding the cost and complexity of the effort. Color analog TV in its current form has been pumping out of broadcast towers in U.S. since 1953. In that time, computers have shrunk from building-size to pinhead while increasing computational power some gazillionfold.

 Analog TV became a more and more obvious waste of valuable spectrum. Not because TV is a wasteland (that’s an argument of a different kind), but because analog uses spectrum extremely inefficiently. Analog signals use 8,000,000 Herz (8 MHz) of spectrum, which correspond to the range used by each channel and spacing between them to avoid interference. These broadcasts carry middling quality voice and video, the equivalent of a few hundred kilobits per second (Kbps) of streaming video over the Internet.

An analog broadcast is remarkably like a set of tin cans used as a telephone. Stretch a string between two cans and the audio vibrations spoken into one can are transmitted through the string, and vibrate the can on the other end in a literal transmission of sound. Analog TV works the same way in an all-analog world: A camera produces a variety of signals that correspond directly to the picture that it’s recording. These continuous signals are sent through the air, and an analog TV, on receiving them, drives an electron-beam across the screen to repaint precisely what it “hears.” (If you have an LCD flat-screen TV, the analog broadcast is received, then converted inside the TV into which pixels need to be which colors and brightness.)

By contrast to analog TV’s inefficiency, Wi-Fi networks have 20 MHz or 40 MHz channels available, and can carry as much as 100 Mbps. Third-generation (3G) cellular networks use as little as 1.25 MHz for up to 1.5 Mbps of downstream speed. Using the same 6 MHz as analog, a DTV signal can carry over 19 Mbps.

Because it’s digital, there’s a lot more flexibility, too: A channel can be divided into several simultaneous broadcasts at different levels of quality.

DTV isn’t equivalent to HDTV: High-definition television refers only to the highest-resolution broadcasts, those that contain the most detail. (Technically HD means broadcast, recorded, or streaming video that’s at least 720 pixels tall with at least 24 frames per second.)

Thus, a single DTV channel, like Seattle’s two public broadcast networks, can carry many lower-detail signals (sub-channels), all with digital fidelity and crisp color and audio, or have one pretty broadcast and several lesser ones. Stations can also go all out and devote everything to a single HD broadcast that displays best only on the highest-end HDTV sets.

You could make the argument that providing more variety in the same “space” is a good move. Public TV can make a great argument for having several channels in which to show educational programming.

And this isn’t all about eating your vegetables. Commercial TV can bring DVD-or-better quality movies and programs without subscription fees to our family rooms.

But, of course, the reason we’re making this switch is about their money not ours. Broadcasters wanted to remain relevant and competitive with cable and satellite providers.  Congress discovered they could book billions in revenues years before it was received by allotting spectrum for resale; And consumer electronics makers were dying to sell us more, bigger, flatter televisions, too. (Cable and satellite TV providers also like DTV: their systems will work indefinitely with analog televisions, so they can sign up customers who don’t want to mess with DTV at all.)

But for us, the DTV transition process (and partial failure) is a story about how the public’s ownership of the airwaves, enshrined in law, is often trifled with, seen as a quant thing like the Constitution’s obsession with minutiae.

Yes, a better picture sounds like a great deal, and the free part is good, too. If you own nearly any television with an antenna jack of any kind ever sold (more or less), and you managed to get a coupon from the National Telecommunications Infrastructure Agency’s TV Converter Box Coupon Program (mouthfuls are government specialty’s), then you paid $10 or less to continue receiving broadcasts.

The argument made by the FCC and the various industries involved in pushing the DTV move is that the pain of transition is worth it for the results: so much more programming. But the pain is ongoing because, various research estimates, as many as 20 million households hadn’t converted to DTV through an adapter or new set as of last year.

Of course, the majority of those households are low-income, non-white, or both, meaning that the benefit of DTV is largely reserved for middle-income-and-better Caucasians without some change.

The billions for the coupon program came from auctions of the analog spectrum, mostly won by cellular carriers. $20 billion was raised a year ago, with the lion’s share paid by AT&T and Verizon. Billions were raised in previous smaller auctions, too. So the coupon program cost is a fraction of the auction price.

The coupon program was poorly set up, for which Congress probably gets the blame. Each household was entitled to two coupons worth $40 each. But once you applied for coupons, you had to use them within 90 days of when they were mailed to avoid millions of unused coupons being booked. (All TVs currently sold have to receive DTV signals, and the conversion to receiving DTV had a phase-in starting years ago.)

So some millions of people have coupons they didn’t use; some bought converters and can’t get them to work; and some 2.4 million want coupons and couldn’t get them. Congress funded more money in the stimulus bill for the program (some of which won’t be used when coupons expire and the money reverts to the Treasury, eventually), and extended the transition target to June 12, 2009.

And other issues are tripping up the transition. Unlike analog TV, in which a signal might come through with a bit of static, but be watchable, DTV is all or nothing. A marginal signal means no channel. I live in the radio shadow of Capitol Hill (near UW), and with a cheap indoor antenna, I get about three stations.

That means that for an unknown number of people (possibly millions of tens of millions), you’ll need to put rabbit ears on the roof to get the stations you receive analog broadcasts of today in DTV form tomorrow. The cost of adding an antenna is not part of any program. If you own more than two TV sets, you’re also on the hook for additional converters.

This is a boon for cable firms, many of which offer moderately priced basic packages, to get into people’s living rooms with a signal that works with both older analog TVs and newer HDTVs. Cable boxes have multiple kinds of audio/video output unaffected by whether the cable system is delivering digital (most are) or analog signals.

As of right now, about 1/3 of the nation’s TV stations have chosen to turn off analog signals to save themselves some electricity and complete the transition. It’s apparently their right. Stations owned by ABC, CBS, and NBC will wait until June 12, but that’s just 100 of 1,800-odd U.S. high-wattage stations. (Low-wattage stations and repeaters used in rural areas aren’t yet subject to shutdown.)

The delay should make some kind of difference in closing the DTV gap for those who most rely on information from analog television. (Yes, and entertainment, but who are you to judge? These are public airwaves.)

Meals on Wheels and senior outreach programs around the U.S. have been working to upgrade people’s setups, with lots of volunteer time made available through layoffs. Groups that focus on minority issues ramped up last year to help as well.

The delay in transition doesn’t make it all better. And U.S. taxpayers can be vaguely grateful at the tens of billions that cellular carriers and others paid for the spectrum they bought.

But I’m hoping that some amount of caution will be exercised for future analog shutdowns. At some point, but not soon, broadcast radio will go all digital (introduction of digital there was completely muffed and is a disaster of a different order), and, one day, our phone lines will all be Internet-based.

The DTV transition shows that when a move that’s allegedly in the public good is driven by expediency and by industries that mostly desire more money from the public, it should be slowed down or rethought. Despite more than a decade of work on this DTV transition, the folks at the bottom of the socioeconomic barrel are once again left to their own devices—analog devices at that. 

Last week's TechNerd here.