During a not very crowded hearing yesterday at Cambridge City Hall, Councilor Henrietta Davis, Chair of the Cable TV, Telecommunications and Public Utilities Committee convened a meeting to find out how prepared Cambridge is for the Digital Television Transition set for February 17, 2009.

If you're not familiar with what's going on, the Federal Communications Commission provides the following on its DTV website:

"On February 17, 2009 all full-power broadcast television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting on analog airwaves and begin broadcasting only in digital. Digital broadcasting will allow stations to offer improved picture and sound quality and additional "

The video above features a ten minute presentation, entitled "Broadcast Digital Television Transition. Feb 17, 2009 is coming. Are you ready?" by David Green, Manager of Government Relations for Comcast. The video was shot on one of our Flip Mino video cameras, available to CCTV members for check-out.

Following the presentation, several questions came up about how the DTV transition will impact people who already subscribe to Comcast, but do NOT have a Comcast digital cable box.

Those who don't have a cable box, may find that - over time - many of their channels will migrate to Comcast's digital channel line-up. As a result, Cambridge residents will find that they will have to buy a Comcast cable box to keep their favorite channels such as MSNBC and the Food Network. Most importantly, there is an additonal fee to purchase the digital cable box.

CCTV Executive Director, Susan Fleischmann asked whether or not the Public, Educational and Government access channels would be impacted by the transition. Mr. Green responded that our channels would stay where they are in the current channel line-up.

There was a lot of confusion in the room between the DTV Convertor Box and Comcast's Digital Cable box - who needs which one and why?

In addition, Councilor Davis and others in the room were concerned about how the senior population will manage this transition. Who will they call if they have a problem setting up or installing their cable boxes? There was no answer for that question - only that during the DTV transition trial run in Wilmington, NC recently, the Fire Department apparently came to people's homes to help with the convertor box installations, stated Councilor Davis.

In addition, Comcast only provides DTV transition information in English and Spanish. What about Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Amharic, and other non-English speakers who will need information about the DTV transition?

These are just a few of the outstanding questions that remain.

In the meantime, you can learn more about the DTV transition for Comcast subscribers on their website at http://www.comcast.com/dtv/