Digital switch: Older TV sets may not get WGTV after Tuesday

Nine Georgia Public Broadcasting stations, including Atlanta’s WGTV (Channel 8), planned to switch to digital broadcasts at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday despite a new federal law that delayed the changeover deadline until summer.

That means local owners of analog TV sets who get signals over the air — as opposed to via cable or satellite — will not be able to watch WGTV without a special converter box starting Wednesday.

WATC (Channel 57), Atlanta’s private educational TV station, will cease analog transmission at midnight as well.

No other Atlanta stations planned to switch this week, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

Congress last week gave TV stations until June 12 to shut down their analog broadcasts to give viewers more time to prepare for the switch to digital signals; the original deadline was next Tuesday. But WGTV and its eight sister public broadcasting stations in Georgia are among more than 600 stations nationwide that said it was more cost effective to go ahead and shut down their over-the-air signal.

GPB’s acting executive director, Bonnie Bean, said antiquated equipment combined with the threat of state budget cuts were key reasons to stick to the Feb. 17 deadline.

GPB has an annual budget of $30 million, $18 million of which comes from the state, Bean said. The other comes from fund-raising.

GPB is facing a 10 percent budget cut — about $1.8 million — from the state, she said. By sticking to the Feb. 17 deadline, the stations will save $200,000 in utility bills and potential repair bills, among other things, Bean said.

Some of the equipment is at least 40 years old, and parts to repair it may not exist anymore, she said.

“It just seemed the best use of state dollars, ” she said. “It really was a fairly easy decision on our part.”

Cutting off the analog signal will also strengthen the digital one, she said. For example, some viewers have told GPB they are having trouble getting some of the stations, including WGTV, based out of Stone Mountain. She expects that to change later next week when it is broadcast only in digital.

President Barack Obama signed the bill this week, saying the later date would give viewers more time to prepare. He says many would have been left in the dark otherwise. Stations that go ahead and shut down the analog signal before that time are not circumventing the new law, said Matt Wigfield, a spokesman for the FCC.

At the same time, Congress left the door open to stations to keep the Feb. 17 date. When a third of U.S. full-power stations said they’d like to do so, the FCC put extra conditions on some of them. Only late Friday did it become clear, or nearly so, which stations would shut down analog four days later, and which would wait for a few more months.

A patchwork of 641 stations across the country, mainly in thinly populated areas, are still turning off their analog broadcasts this week or have already done so. The most populous markets where many or all major-network stations are cutting analog include San Diego and Santa Barbara, Calif.; Providence, R.I.; La Crosse and Madison, Wis.; Rockford, Ill.; Sioux City, Iowa; Waco, Texas; Macon, Ga.; Scranton, Pa.; and Burlington, Vt.

“I think this whole delay is ridiculous,” said Robert Prather, president of Gray Television Inc., an Atlanta-based company that owns 36 stations. “It’s just going to cause confusion among consumers. There’s no reason in the world for it that I can understand.”

No one really knows how many viewers will be affected this week. Nielsen Co. said 5.8 million U.S. households, or 5.1 percent of all homes, were not ready for the analog shutdown, but it’s unclear how many of them are in early-shutdown areas. The figure for metro Atlanta was 67,000 unprepared households, or about 3 percent of the media market.

The National Association of Broadcasters has taken issue with Nielsen’s numbers, saying they exaggerate the problem by counting households that have digital converters but haven’t connected them.

“The ones who aren’t going to be ready aren’t going to be ready in June any more than they are now,” Prather said.

Gray applied to keep the Feb. 17 date for most of its stations, but the push-back from the FCC left it with 14 that could. As a final twist, Gray over the weekend decided to turn those off on the 16th, some in the afternoon and the rest at midnight, because its lawyers interpreted the rules as saying analog should be “off the air by the 17th” rather “go off the air on the 17th.”

Other stations differ in their interpretation, and plan to cut analog sometime on Tuesday.

WHO’S SWITCHING

A network of nine Georgia Public Broadcast stations have asked the FCC to shut off their analog signal Wednesday, keeping with the original date that all TV stations were to go all-digital.

WABW (Albany)

WGTV (Atlanta)

WCES (Augusta)

WNGH (Chatsworth)

WJSP (Columbus)

WACS (Dawson)

WMUM (Macon)

WVAN (Savannah)

WXGA (Waycross)

Note: Does not include WPBA (Channel 30)