![]() ![]() The deal was that they would give up their old channels when the transition was done. To ease the transition, Congress generously gave all television broadcasters additional channel space so that they could keep broadcasting their analog signals while they installed and launched their digital channels. version of HDTV was that to make it work, all broadcast television (not just high-definition) would have to convert to digital, meaning that every American television set manufactured since 1946 would be rendered obsolete. (Ironically, Zenith, the most all-American commercial participant in the Grand Alliance, is now South Korean-owned.) Thus, early on, HDTV invoked not just pretty pictures, but national pride and economic development. As a result, a group of American companies formed the “Grand Alliance” that leapfrogged the Japanese technology by inventing digital HDTV. Everyone from Congress to the Wall Street Journal raised outcries: America’s favorite technology was being taken over by the then-fearsome Japan Inc. It all started back in the Eighties, when the Japanese shocked American consumer electronics companies with trade-show displays of high definition television sets that delivered razor-sharp images and stunning audio. The debate over when to throw the switch is a strange brew of big money, high technology, homeland security and a single, unanswerable question: just how angry are the couch potatoes going to be? It’s also a textbook example of why the future almost never happens as fast as technologists promise. But powerful lobbyists now are pressing legislators to set a “date certain” for the analog lights-out. Congress, however, left itself a loophole in the 1996 legislation, and could actually let the cut-off date slide by. ![]()
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