Broadcasters in Hawaii have taken the plunge - not into the pristine blue waters of the Pacific Ocean - but into the world of DTV.  They turned off their analog signals this week.

While Congress and the president-elect wrangle over delaying the DTV switch until June, the changeover in Hawaii apparently went off pretty painlessly.  There were some viewer concerns, but it seems the Hawaiian broadcasters had covered all the bases to make it as smooth a transition as possible.

KGMB9 news director Chris Archer described the switch this way, “Since we're the Severe Weather Station, I thought I'd make a weather analogy.  Some people in Hawaii thought the transition would be a hurricane.  Others thought it would simply be a sunny day.  I'd call it a clear day with light trades for KGMB, with just a few passing clouds for some of the other stations.  Nonetheless, there were no big problems.”  To help ease the transition to DTV, the FCC set up, and manned, a local call center.  It received less than 1,000 calls on the day the switch was pulled. 

Archer credits three key things for making the switch to DTV successful in Hawaii:

• Lots of notice!  KGMB did their first DTV test back in February - switching off the analog signal during newscasts.  They ran a crawl on their analog signal beginning one month out over programming and newscasts warning of the change.  The crawl said, “If you see this message, you many not be able to watch TV on January 15th.  Call this number now.”  They did numerous news stories about the switch, including a heavy web presence.  KGMB even customized their home page masthead so it counted down the days to the changeover.
• FCC Call Center.  Although the station, and the newsroom, still received some calls, the call center took a lot of pressure off the individual stations.  They set up a phone tree redirecting callers to the local hotline first, and asked them to call KGMB back if their problem was unique to the station's signal.
• Excellent Engineering Staff.   KGMB's chief engineer Mike McCarthy took on the DTV project and ran with it.  He even helped some other stations in the market in the process.  There was excellent cooperation between all the Hawaii stations to make this a smooth transition.  All five Honolulu stations even brought their top news talent together to create promos talking about going digital.

So, should Congress delay the DTV switch until June?  Based on the Hawaii experience, I'd vote “NO” on that one.  So would most mainland broadcasters, who are ready to go, and want to lose the expense of power to that analog tower as soon as possible.

Jim

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 8:01 am and is filed under Willi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.