Digital TV Facts: The Latest

Speaking of converter boxes and unveilings, I’ll mention our new Converter Box section that went up this week. I hope it will have everything you want to know about those little boxes that will give your old analog TV a new lease on life after February 17, 2009.

Today’s New York Times article on converter boxes was a good piece, by the way. Blogger Chris’s take:

It’s the first article I’ve seen in a major publication that actually gets the details of the transition right.

Coverage of the DTV conversion by most newspapers has improved, I believe. Jaques Steinberg deserves bonus points for his nuanced, if brief, mention of satellite and cable customers: they are, he wrote, “not expected to have much disruption.” That’s essentially true. For the rest of the story, see these articles:

• Digital TV Facts for cable subscribers

• Digital TV Facts for satellite subscribers

So, all praise for The New York Times. (I frankly don’t know what we would do without it, and I don’t ever want to find out.) But allow me, if you will, to make one tiny observation about that article, a thoroughly objective one.

It didn’t mention this site.

Well, it’s no surprise that he sends people to the DTV sites put up by the FCC and the broadcasters who lobby them. Those sites are worth looking at, certainly. (What’s more, people know they exist.) They each give you part of the story of the digital TV conversion, from the point of view of a government bureaucracy and the industry it regulates. They will help you through the digital transition.

DTV Facts isn’t as pretty as the broadcasters’ site or as noisy as the FCC’s (which actually scares me every time I go there, even after I switched to the green tea). We’re your unofficial digital TV site, by no means the only one, and I hope we touch on all relevant sides of the story. The move to digital TV has fascinated me from the beginning, so I decided to write about it. That’s my television background. (Well, that and a brief stint as a Mystery Science Theater 3000 intern.) So I am connected neither to the industry nor to what passes for our government, and, you know, my heart is pretty pure for our times.

Finally, I believe you’ll find more about digital-to-analog converter boxes here than at those other two sites. I’ll be adding to the new section as we go. If it doesn’t give you everything you want to know, please get in touch and tell me what’s missing.

Related:
• Our Converter Box section