TVSquad

Well, after announcements, commercials, and delays which generated more announcements and commercials, broadcast TV is finally being dragged into the 21st century at 12:30 pm today. That's when channels all across the country shut off their analog signals and just broadcast digitally. If you're still one of the multitudes who use an antenna and did not prepare for the transition by buying a converter -- and, according to Nielsen, 2.8 million people still aren't ready -- you'd better run out and get one now or else you're just going to see snow.

For those of you who have already made the transition, you'll notice that there are some extra channels on your TV, maybe with names like 2.1 or 2-1 or 12.13 or 13-12 or whatever. Some channels have taken advantage of the extra bandwidth DTV allows by broadcasting extra channels of specialized content. But are they worth watching? At this point, not really.

You may not have realized it after coming off of your President's Day Booze and Beef BBQ, but February 17th was the voluntary day for television stations to turn off those piddly analog signals and crank up their digital ones. Other than one guy shooting his television over the conversion, the switchover of about a quarter of the 1800 television stations in the U.S. went off fairly smoothly. Course, this was just the dress rehearsal. The real performance will be on June 12th, which has become the new 'no change' cut over date.

Being a proud citizen of the United States, I thought I'd take your pulse once again and find out if any stations in your viewing area cut over on Tuesday. If they did, and you were one of those remaining folks without a cable hookup, did you encounter any problems with your new digital converter box? Also, just out of curiosity, was there one major market station that remained in analog mode while the others jumped into the digital pool?

Come on, Americans! Let your voice ring out on this matter.