DTV Education Focuses on Antennas, Converters After Wilmington
Broadcasters and consumer electronic companies are educating people about antennas and converter boxes needed to get digital TV as analog cutoff approaches for all U.S. full- power stations, industry officials said. Broadcasters said this month’s early analog cutoff in Wilmington, N.C., (CD Sept 10 p1) underscored the importance of telling viewers that they may need to buy new antennas or reposition current ones to receive DTV. The early transition in Wilmington, the only market set to go all digital before Feb. 17, also showed that consumers need to learn how to set up converter boxes, broadcast officials said.
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NAB and CEA officials said their members are concentrating on those points. Wilmington station managers and NAB officials called the market’s early switch a success, but said it showed ways to fine tune education.
“The rest of the country can expect that they're going to be a lot of people out there who aren’t going to pay attention to how to set up their converter boxes properly, how to set up their antennas,” said WWAY General Manager Andy Combs. Viewers need to learn that they must set their converter boxes to scan for digital channels before they can watch them, said Combs, WILM General Manager Constance Knox and others. “I keep thinking we could have done a better job of educating people” about box and antenna set up, but the market was “inundated” with public service announcements and other information on those subjects, said Knox. “There’s a certain amount of people out there who are just going to choose” not to “pay attention, so those are the people who are just going to have to be addressed on Feb. 17,” she added.
NAB hopes to head off last-minute confusion by telling viewers they should buy and test all DTV gear well in advance of the cutoff, a spokesman said. The education efforts of broadcasters and the FCC in Wilmington were “wildly successful,” but “we're concerned that not enough people checked out their equipment ahead of time to make sure that it worked,” he added. “We feel that a large proportion of the calls received by the FCC could have been avoided had viewers gone through the hoops of testing their equipment beforehand and moving forward that is going to be a key message for television stations” to focus on ginning up such preparedness, he said. “This will avoid last-minute hassles and a lot of late confusion with the program.” The FCC got 1,221 calls the day of Wilmington’s transition and the next day. But only 23 callers were unaware of the transition.
A volunteer whose Wilmington church received more than 200 calls for help making the change said questions about antennas and converters were the most common. Stations nationwide should air demonstrations of how to hook up converter boxes, as WECT did in Wilmington, said Patrick Holmes of the Union Missionary Baptist Church. “More of the education part of it should be hands on,” because if you “weren’t a technical person it would be very hard” to set up boxes, Holmes said. “You can’t teach a viewer how to set up a converter box in a 30 second spot, but we can encourage viewers to test out their equipment, to scan for channels and to rescan,” the NAB spokesman said. “That’s what our message is going to focus on.”
As DTV awareness among Americans is “reaching near universal levels,” stations’ efforts will concentrate on equipment, he said. Illustrating that most people are aware of DTV, most of the questions that executives of the group and stations get at education events are specific ones about converters and other gear, said an NAB spokeswoman. CEA believes it’s important to show consumers how to hook up and “correctly” use converters and give consumers information about antennas, a spokeswoman said. “Both of these messages will continue to be important.”