Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington — Federal officials and broadcasters are hoping that Friday's switch to all-digital broadcast television for most stations in Los Angeles and around the country will run as smoothly as a scripted sitcom and not turn into the ultimate reality TV mess.
The odds of a more orderly transition have improved, they said, because of a four-month delay pushed by the Obama administration at the beginning of the year.
"We are in much better shape," said Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst for Consumers Union.
Fearful of a backlash from nearly 6 million unprepared Americans who stood to lose their broadcast TV signals, President Obama and Congress put off the long-planned digital transition scheduled for Feb. 17 until June 12 for most of the country.
They poured an additional $650 million into the switch, including reducing a backlog of 4 million requests for $40 government coupons to buy special digital converter boxes so that older TV sets could receive the new signals. The Obama administration made a smooth transition a priority, a major shift from what critics said was an underfunded and disorganized effort by the Bush administration.
For their part, broadcasters have continued their outreach efforts, trying to avoid losing precious viewers.
In Los Angeles, Univision's KMEX Channel 34 dispatched teams of employees and volunteers that it called the Escuadron Digital, or Digital Squad, to senior centers to educate older viewers. Walt Disney Co.'s KABC Channel 7 has been beaming an electronic message warning of the switch from its towering sign off the Golden State Freeway.
One of NBC Universal's Spanish-language stations in Los Angeles, KWHY Channel 22, provided a booth to the Federal Communications Commission at last month's Fiesta Broadway event in downtown L.A., which was attended by hundreds of thousands of Latinos. NBC's other Spanish-language station, Telemundo's KVEA Channel 52, helped coordinate with local radio stations contests that gave away free digital converter boxes to listeners.
The goal of all those efforts has been to turn the digital TV conversion into a non-event for most Americans, similar to another technological milestone: the much-feared but largely inconsequential Y2K computer bug at the turn of the century.
