Apparently, this has been in the works for some time, but I just found out that on December 31st, 2006, television broadcasting is slated to end. No, it's not April Fools day. Heck, it's barely April anymore.
In 1996, a ton of legislation was passed regarding television, telephone, and internet policy. Maybe it was only because I was a TV Production major in college at the time, but I was very aware of the telecommunications act of 1996 - it is what allowed the same company to provide telephone, television, and internet service. Apparently, a decision was also made to switch entirely to a digital format in a decade. Now, as that date approaches, it seems surreal that you'll no longer be able to plug in a TV with rabbit ears and get the locally broadcast shows.
Congress and the FCC are in talks about the issue, so it's not a definate that broadcast television will go the way of 8-track casettes and flash cubes, but lobbyists for the cable companies are pushing for that cutoff date. Greedy bastards.
Here's a link to an MSNBC article with more info.
I'm also not buying the Government position that we should subsidize converter boxes for "low income" families, the way we do telephones now. Telephones have come to be more-or-less essential survival equipment in this country, but TELEVISION? C'mon. If you want news, radio is free - remember radio? No pictures, though, so you have to think about stuff . . . I see the fine hand of Madison Avenue here - gotta make sure The Masses see all those ads. If you're _that_ poor, going without five cases of Bud will pay for the box.
There are some downsides here, mostly design and technology related. I've never liked smart networks. The reason the Internet works reasonably well is because we have smart devices (computers, mostly) connected to a dumb network. Big Business wants to change this, but so far they haven't had much luck (mostly because the MBAs and politicians don't have a clue how any of this stuff actually works). The network simply functions as a connective medium, so what counts is what you put on the servers and the clients.
An example of a smart network is the telephone system. In it's simplest form, dumb devices (phones) get connected to a network that controls what services you can get. Even though phones are pretty smart these days, the TELCO network controls what you can do with them. The telephone company always has control over what services you can use and, of course, how much you pay for them.
Digital television promises to develop into a smart network - if you have a cable box, you already know what I'm talking about. Consumers should be more worried about that. We already know that TV news can be - has been - fabricated.
In the 1950s, when I was a kid, there were no commercial FM radio stations (WDRC in Hartford, CT was the first in the US) and television was in a limited, but rapidly growing, number of households. That means that the majority of news and whatnot came over AM radio - long range AM radio. I've picked up WBZ (Boston) in Miami at night, and had absolutely no trouble getting the New York stations in Connecticut. In addition, half the kids I knew had short-wave radios that could easily pull in European and Asian stations.
Now, with high-frequency short range communications and cable (which is essentially a LAN), it seems to me that anyone who feels like it can block or alter local news to their liking. Digital TV is just another step down this road.
There was a scene in "The Count of Monte Cristo" where Edmond bribes a semaphore telegraph operator to transmit a phony message. Semaphore telegraphs and modern communications have one thing in common - they rely on _relays_. Change something in the middle of the relay chain, and how's the receiver at the end of the chain going to know it? How's the sender going to know the original message wasn't received? That's why you're better off with a dumb network than with a smart one.
I'd worry more about being able to find out what's _really_ going on in the world and less about the price of a set-top converter box.