After all the delays and pushed back cancelation dates, today marks the last day of analog television.
What does this mean to me? Nothing, really. I only own one really ghetto t.v. with basic cable and a cable box. So since I can still watch Man vs. Wild with no problems, I haven’t paid much attention to this. I did wonder, however, why we were making the switch.
Here is the explanation in a nutshell, minus other federal and economic reasons that I didn’t want to get into.
Apparently, current television broadcast signals travel through the electromagnetic spectrum along with AM and FM radio, shortwave radio and radar. They take up a large chunk of this spectrum and by switching them to digital, they will take up 25% less space. The digital code is also more concise, has the ability to be high-definition and can have surround-sound encoded into it.
The new space created by the switch from analog to digital were returned to the federal government and auctioned off to new providers and services. They made over $19 billion.
Now I have learned something and maybe you have as well.
In the search world, this has companies running more digital tv ads and more people searching for “digital tv” related keywords. Google Trends shows that searches for the digital transition are 10% of this morning’s top searches. If you have a way to capitalize on this trend, you should probably take advantage of it now.
What a joyful day it is!
i’m glad that the switch is finally happening… it seems like they’ve been talking about it for years now