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Tell Us About Your DTV Transition Day
Will TV watchers go berserk in the streets on June 12, 2009, or will the whole thing be as uneventful as Y2k? Share your D-Day stories!
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June 11, 2009 | by Julie Jacobson

When analog goes dark on June 12, 2009, will it be as anticlimactic as Y2k or will weird stuff happen?

Will antenna sales and installations surge, as Zip Express expects?

Will people cancel cable and satellite subscriptions en masse? About 58% of consumers say they would likely drop their service if they could get free over-the-air HDTV.

Will some 2.8 million unprepared consumers flock to A/V retailers to buy new sets when the reality of DTV Day sets in?

Will manufacturers and A/V dealers be flooded with customer service calls?

Will the DTV Transition ads finally cease?!

In the Comments section below, let us know how your day is going!

Meanwhile, we’re headed to our cabin in the remote town of Brandon, Minn., where we will have no choice but to watch Season 4 of Weeds on a Netflix DVD.



Julie Jacobson - Editor-at-large, CE Pro
Julie Jacobson is co-founder of EH Publishing and currently spends most of her time writing for CE Pro, mostly in the areas of home automation, networked A/V and the business of home systems integration. She majored in Economics at the University of Michigan, earned an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin, and has never taken a journalism class in her life. Julie is a washed-up Ultimate Frisbee player with the scars to prove it. Follow her on Twitter @juliejacobson.



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Comments (19) Most recent displayed first.
Posted by Jan  on  06/18/09  at  08:41 PM

I have had no TV signal since the change. I have a Haier flatscreen that I thought woudl be OK but I still cannot find out whether or not it has an internal tuner. Neither the manufacturer or dealer can confirm either way.

Right now I am so fed up with this we are going to try and give up TV altogether and see how it goes. We already gave up cable due to costs and terrible programming and this DTV changeover is the last straw.

Posted by ar  on  06/18/09  at  05:25 PM

i have been watching digital tv for around 6 months. channel 7 was a bit difficult, and they changed from 63 ufh signal to 53 and became super. i was delighted watching the nba finals. until the 12 arrived and channel 7 dissapeared, and still i cannot get nothing. i got more channels, but i do not know what signal they have, in the large la, aparently they still have the signal on 53, but i do not understand why stopped working on the 12.

Posted by Harry Glosser  on  06/16/09  at  03:29 PM

I live and work in Bucks County Pa.  Prior to the transition I had no trouble getting WPVI 6 ABC at either my home or office when using the UHF band .Since WPVI went to VHF band only some of my sets at home get the signal and it is weak and breaks up. I have good equipment and antennas.  I can not get any signal at my office.  My home is 22.4 miles from the station and my office is 26.7. Clearly the power needs to receive this station were poorly reviewed prior to June 12th.

Posted by Julie Jacobson  on  06/16/09  at  09:22 AM

I had some recording problems with CBS on my Media Center

Posted by David  on  06/16/09  at  06:59 AM

Lost ABC and CBS here in Chicago if you are running Media Center on Windows 7.  Took me a few hours to figure out what the problem was. Turns out Media Center doesn’t just scan for channels the way a normal TV does. It downloads guide data based on your location and the searches for the channel based on where the guide tells it to look.

Now the problems start when the guide tells Media Center to look in the wrong place. After the digital switch here in Chicago ABC moved from channel 52 to channel 7 and CBS moved from 3 to 12. These are their physical locations which differ from their old analogue brand numbers, which love on through the magic of virtual channel numbers.

The guide data has not yet been fixed as of 7am on Tuesday June 16th, 4 days after the switch.

You can manually add these 2 channels to the guide, but because there is no guide data associated with them, automatic recordings do not work, although you can program it to record at specific times, like an old school VCR. But this is just a waste of time.  This a serious flaw with Media Center!


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