- NEWS
- SPORTS
- Final: Knicks 92, Lakers 85 1 hour & 52 minutes ago
- Final: Red Wings 2, Ducks 1 (SO) 1 hour & 48 minutes ago
- Clippers steal an ugly victory at Philadelphia 2 hours & 13 minutes ago
- Angels bullpen: What do they have to work with? 2 hours & 12 minutes ago
- BUSINESS
- ENTERTAINMENT
- Ballet de Monte-Carlo’s ‘Cinderella’ charms in Costa Mesa 3 hours & 37 minutes ago
- O.C. woman gets a life makeover on 'The Revolution' 3 hours & 16 minutes ago
- Director Bobby Farrelly's son dies in O.C. 3 hours & 42 minutes ago
- Grammy predictions: Adele will have it all
- LIFE
- TRAVEL
- Sneak peak: New Vegas mob museum a “hit” 6 minutes ago
- A ‘Flying Fortress' flies in O.C.
- The African American journey 2 hours & 58 minutes ago
- My speed date with JWA's Terminal C
- OPINION
Ho hum — DTV switch hype reminds me of Y2K
June 12th, 2009, 4:14 pm · 15 Comments · posted by Tamara Chuang, a.k.a. The Gadgetress
UPDATE: As of 6 p.m., the National Association of Broadcasters it had heard few issues reported to TV stations nationwide — an average of 121 calls and a median of 40 calls per station. Biggest issues were rescanning converter boxes and antennas.
——————————————-
I didn’t really want to come to work today to face dozens, possibly hundreds of phone messages from readers who weren’t quite prepared for today’s switch to digital television broadcasts.
But I guess everybody did their jobs. I had just one phone call this morning and a few e-mails and comments. The call was from a guy who decided to finally hook up his converter box bought last year. He called his local Best Buy to take advantage of the retailer’s FREE in-home installation by Geek Squad and was told he had to buy the box within the past 30 days. (Not true, by the way, the free service, which is funded by the government, will install any box purchased at any time from any store.)
There was also a comment on my blog (Rev: “What happened to channel 9?”), but I suspect Rev may be joking. Nevertheless, I found that Channel 9 switched at 1:10 p.m. today with no issues.
While TV stations nationwide have been transitioning all day, many Orange County and Los Angeles stations are actually going to start tonight, from 6 p.m. to midnight. Here’s the list from the National Association of Broadcasters:
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KAZA-TV AVALON
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KBEH OXNARD
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KCOP-TV LOS ANGELES
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KFTR-TV ONTARIO
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KMEX-TV LOS ANGELES
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KOCE-TV HUNTINGTON BEACH
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KRCA RIVERSIDE
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KTBN-TV SANTA ANA
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KTLA LOS ANGELES
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KTTV LOS ANGELES
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KVEA CORONA
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KWHY-TV LOS ANGELES
- EV=6pm-12am LOS ANGELES KXLA RANCHO PALOS VERDES
The NAB has been tracking TV stations’ reports all day and really, there have been few issues. Local stations that went digital today had an average of 130 calls per station, as of 1 p.m. The most calls happened in Houston, Texsas, where stations received 675 calls, mostly about rescanning.
KVCR, the PBS affiliate in the Inland Empire, transitionied at 5:30 a.m. and reported just seven calls as of 2:30 p.m.
Yes, many, many millions of dollars were spent to make today a, pretty much, non-event for most consumers and, thankfully, me.
More digital TV transition news:
Check out the Gadgetress Guide to the Digital TV transition.
Reader Comments
Comments are encouraged, but you must follow our User Agreement.- Keep it civil and stay on topic.
- No profanity, vulgarity, racial slurs or personal attacks.
- People who harass others or joke about tragedies will be blocked.
15 Comments
-
ADVERTISEMENT
-
To view local listings CLICK
HERE
Or visit your TV provider: * Cox Cable * Time Warner Cable * DirecTV * Dish Network * AT&T U-verse * Verizon FiOS *
Watch a show online HERE. Get TV/mobile help on Twitter
-
-
The North Orange County Computer Club answers your tech questions. Visit the PC Club page and the Stump archives.Recent Q&As:
>>Click HERE for more PC Club answers 
More O.C. Tech News- Predixion Lands Fueling Operator Flying J February 10, 2012
- Fisker Automotive Chops Staff February 7, 2012
- Mindspeed Completes Picochip Buy February 7, 2012
- Broadcom Launches Microwave Communications Chip February 6, 2012
- Interview with Jonathan LaCour, Playzon February 3, 2012
- Fisker Debuts In Canada February 2, 2012
- Numecent Raises $2M February 2, 2012
- M86 Security Raises $13.6M February 1, 2012
- TextPower Signs Electric Utility February 1, 2012
- Ceradyne settles helicopter armor claim May 27, 2010
-
ADVERTISEMENT
Here's a list of TV/mobile companies helping consumers one tweet at a time. 
TV hype make some people nuts!
it’s not like we didn’t know this was going to happen today…. with the amount of commercials and congress extending the time to get everyone prepared…. if you’re playing the “I didn’t know” card, then you deserve to have NO TV connection.
The government dod not spend millions on this stupid project. It spent billions! The government made this so complicated and delayed it sooooooooo long that the people in charge should give back all the money they were paid to deliver this project over budget over due and over complex. Broadcasters were ready to go a year ago and did not want help from thre feds. Barney Frank and his cohorts wanted to make sure every citizen with rabbit ears coulld continue watching their local chanels. All at a mere cost of BILLIONS!
Look at all the money wasted hyping this up. It could be spent finding a vaccine for swine flu, or fixing our f***ed up economy. What a waste. Shoulda just DONE it and been DONE with it.
Sign of the time….Digital TV has arrived!
Maybe these stations found out how few viewers they actually have!
But seriously, it is pretty obvious that the National Association of Broadcasters and the FCC were WAY off in their calculations as far as numbers of affected viewers.
Funny, dozens of small city TV markets like Peoria Illinois switched back in February 2009, the original deadline. And, nothing terrible happened!
Nice to see the small cities/towns of US have taken the lead on this! And,the backward big cities like LA, NYC, and Chicago are 6 months behind!
I’m SOOOO jealous of Peoria!
From the reports yesterday of converters “flying off the shelves” in LA/OC, I suspect that there are only a few thousand without TV this morning.
I went over to a friends yesterday and I wasn’t impressed with the DTV switch. All the channels would pause, skip or become distorted. Really sucked trying to watch the Hockey Playoffs. Glad I have cable TV. I was thinking of picking up a DTV Box and store it for future use but now I’m not sure that’s a good ideal.
Sounds like they have a problem with their signal. They should check the signal map on dtv.gov. Are they using an outdoor antenna?
KTTV channel 11 is still having problems after the switch. They
told me that they are running at VERY low power today – 15 KW
compared to the 800 KW they should be using.
The FCC reported before the transition that 3 million people were not ready. Now they say only 300,000 called their help line on Friday. As far as reception, I hooked up a $50 indoor amplified antenna to my digital tv and could not get several local stations that I could before the switch. I’n with Tn TinOC–I’m sticking with my satellite
A few articles have reported that a number of TV stations switched from using their UHF antenna to their VHF antenna for transmission at the “switch.” The stations didn’t tell anyone. It caused some loss of DTV channels being received on HDTV indoor UHF antennas. I use an amplified VHF/UHF (rabbit ears) and get 58 digital and 8 VHF (my last auto search). I lost DTV channels 7, 11 and 13 at the “switch.” I hope this is only a power glitch and that they will correct it. I called to complain and you should too.
Me too. What a non- event. I did not see people running into the streets screeming that they could not watch the news or Oprah. It would have been more fun to watch the talking heads explode when analog finally went off the air. But no one noticed.