posted on Nov, 17 2008 @ 08:21 PM
There is a ton of information about the money and technical sides at FCC.gov along the bids getting ready to go out.
I'll copy a response I made on another thread on this very subject within this site.
Going from analog TV to digital TV is a leap of 80 years or so in technology. The analog system is based on vacuum tube technology and hasn't really
changed since inception.
Digital broadcasting frees up band width of the radio spectrum. 20 years or even 10 years ago, this would have not been a big deal. The FCC would have
given some of these frequencies away for no cost, or just reallocated them to existing fixed bands services.
Existing analog channels i.e. channel 4, requires around 6 MHz for the picture and sound to broadcast on 2 different frequencies and mixed to form the
picture and audio you receive from the TV. This 6 MHz per channel is required for all the channels broadcast on analog TV. Digital signals will also
use the same 6 MHz, but they are allowed to broadcast next to one another. There are only a few channel combinations allowed to broadcast side by side
in a market, due to interference from one another. This would be like a channel 4 and channel 5 in one market, this is allowed, but not channel 8 and
9.
This 6 MHz block used by digital broadcasting can have several channels within the 6 MHz. Where, with analog broadcasting, only 1 channel; now you can
compress 4 streams into the same bandwidth.
Because of the analog wide usage of bandwidth, and the rules that would only allow certain channels to be broadcast side by side, this caused channels
to be spread across the radio spectrum and not in one continuous block. Digital TV removes these barriers and the related wasted bandwidth.
What makes this switch now apparent is that freeing up radio spectrum in different frequencies, have different applications used by today's
electronics. WIFI will have many more options for locations that were not available due to interference from analog signals.
Cellphones will take over some frequencies in the VHF and UHF bands currently held by channels over 14 and above.
With this additional WIFI and cellphone usage comes money that will be generated by the FCC to allow companies to broadcast on these newly opened
frequencies. As for the money side, we are discussing billions of dollars of revenue coming into the federal government. This is why you are seeing
the media blitz.
The 2/2009 is just the deadline for stations to complete the transition to digital broadcasting, nothing more or less.