OK, now it’s really starting to sink in. In 364 days from today, analog TV stations will turn off their transmitters all across the United States. One by one, those thousands of "lights" (some of which have been burning for more than 50 years) will wink out, replaced by shiny new digital TV transmitters.

Are we ready? Better hope so, although Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) have their doubts. They have asked President Bush to create an inter-agency DTV task force in an attempt to ramp up the consumer education process, claiming the current DTV transition education process lacks coordination between government agencies, broadcasters, and trade associations like NAB.

The first DTV converter boxes are starting to appear on store shelves, and the NTIA $20 coupons are on schedule to be mailed out later this month. In my market, several TV stations have been airing frequent PSAs about the transition. Some have relied on the NAB campaign (good), while others are using their well-known consumer reporters to do more in-depth stories (better).

I was interviewed for one of those stories, which aired on Philadelphia FOX affiliate WTXF-29 this past Saturday evening. When the reporter and camerawoman arrived, I had set up several DTV "displays" including a 13-inch Dynex CRT TV with Zenith’s DTT900 converter box connected to it, a Samsung LN-T4681F 46-inch integrated 1080p LCD HDTV, and my Acer laptop computer with the OnAir Solution HDTV-GT feeding the 720p/60 signal from WTXF’s digital transmitter on UHF channel 42.

During my recent Super Bowl HDTV Party, I had the Dynex/Zenith demo running again and also left out a pile of literature from the DTV Transition Web site. That stack of paper was noticeably thinner at the end of the evening, although I’m not sure many guests realized the Zenith box wouldn’t provide an HDTV signal to their old TV, only an SD version.

Fact is; the DTV transition just hasn’t been on most people’s radar until recently. And there is still plenty of confusion about the cable end of things. I’ve gotten numerous questions and emails lately asking me if "the cable box has to go" or "will my DirecTV still work?"

The pastor of my church purchased one of the HDTVs used in the Super Bowl HDTV Party, and I installed it for him a week ago Saturday. He and his wife have basic cable service without a set-top box and seemed pretty confused about their options, post D-Day.

Not to worry, I assured them, and connected the RF input to their cable feed to scan for their local digital TV stations, carried as 64-QAM and 256-QAM DTV signals. Eventually, we located them all, but not where they should have been in the channel map. In fact, only two local stations mapped correctly (WPHL 17-1 and WTXF 29-1), while the rest wound up hiding on physical cable channels like 89-2 and 90-4.

Comcast’s head end usually passes along the virtual channel table (VCT) information from each Philadelphia DTV station’s PSIP, even though the program guide bits are "cherry-picked" out of the MPEG stream. But this time, the crucial bits were missing.

I can only wonder how many other cable head ends aren’t paying attention to VCT info when retransmitting local DTV stations. A substantial portion of cable TV subscribers are considered "basic" customers, watching only terrestrial analog channels sans any cable box. There’s no reason they should need one with the new generation of integrated digital TVs after the transition, if the cable company does its job right.

But what if they don’t? Just another massive headache to deal with, as we approach D-Day…

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