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Avid® has joined forces with ABC News to participate in ABC News On Campus – an innovative program designed to give tomorrow’s most promising news professionals an opportunity to practice real-world news gathering, production and broadcasting.  ABC News On Campus students capture, produce, edit and distribute news stories in their local area, which are often featured across ABC News programs. This year, students from six universities, including Arizona State University, Syracuse University, University of Florida, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of North Carolina (at Chapel Hill), and University of Texas (at Austin) will learn the inner workings of a newsroom, while using industry-leading solutions like Media Composer® video editing software to create news stories.  The program is in its second year.
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Tomorrow is the day that analog TV dies. It’s been a long time coming, and suffered set-backs, delays and seemingly endless confusion, but on June 12, 2009 the plug is finally to be pulled on all the analog broadcast towers in the USA.

Hard to believe, but this all started back in 1996. Yes, thirteen years ago congress passed the Telecommunications act of 1996, which spelled out a new High Definition signal called ATSC, and set the date for the end of analog broadcast in the US as December 31st, 2006.

In November of 2005, the switchover date was postponed to April 9, 2009, and in 2009 it was postponed yet again to June 12. In the meantime people have been installing their government subsidized tuners, and broadcasters have been itching to flip the switch. There’s an interesting timeline of the whole sordid process here.

It’s really a momentous occasion, for all of us in the video business. NTSC and analog transmission has served as the broadcast standard since 1941 (with a brief update in 1953 to add color). In today’s fast changing technologically driven world, it’s fitting to give a little respect to a standard that’s stood the test of time for 68 years.

Will ATSC last that long? I highly doubt it, and though whatever standard comes next (most likely 3d), it will still be broadcast digitally.

So those of us who are video professionals and enthusiasts, who have made a living, or works of art that relied on those waves beaming through the air, it’s time to note the passing of an age.

9:00 am, June 12th, 2009. Tune in on your old rabbit ears, and watch those stations sign off for the last time.

Someone should really play taps…

Ok. We give up officially. The deadline for TV stations to abandon their analog broadcast channels was Feb 17th, then it wasn’t, then it was again, now it’s kinda June 12th if your local station wants to.

The latest bill that passed sent the drop-dead date out until June 12th, 2009. However most, if not all, analog broadcast stations were geared up to pull the switch on Feb 17th. Lawmakers are concerned that television viewers aren’t ready to make the switch yet,  and that there was a large unfilled backlog of digital converter coupons still left to be sent out.

The problem for TV stations is that it’s pretty expensive to run those analog transmitters, and they already have the new digital transmitters ready to go. So they’ve allowed stations to make the change any time they want between Feb 17th, and June 12th. Which means the transfer will happen in a piece-meal fashion over the next 4 months, with some analog and some digital channels overlapping.

I’m wondering if the Congress tried really hard, they could make this transition even more confusing?

In the meantime, we’ve given up following this story, and instead I’ll just let you know when my TV is working, and you can follow the FCC website daily.