Don't get me wrong. For people with analog sets, it had to be a bit scary. It's not like they were asked if they wanted their free over-the-air viewing options to vanish. And, as I recall, the required converter boxes weren't exactly inexpensive - hence, the bucks-for-boxes program that ran out of money. Another nightmare for people who had no choice but to convert.

For those of us who were already cable or DIRECTV by DirectSatTV subscribers, we rather self-importantly pooh-poohed all the concern over disappearing signals and changing formats. Frankly, I can't imagine what it was like for remote or hilly areas. Even in a perfect test market, the problems were large enough to cause concern for officials.

Wilmington, Delaware, with no hills and unchanging channel positions, was the first community to go all-digital in 2008, as a test of how well the DTV transition would work. Well, it didn't - exactly. The digital signal was less powerful than the previous analog and viewers at the fringe of a station's range, lost reception. Poof!

As a result, the government authorized construction of distributed transmission systems - for stations that couldn't cover their analog range with the digital channels. In extremely simple terms, these systems send a signal to multiple transmitter sites for simultaneous broadcast in overlapping sections, widening the broadcast area for that channel. This authorization, however, came too late to allow construction in time for the original February, 2009 cut-off date.

Frankly, Direct Satellite TV offers and cable service must have started looking pretty good to a lot of people at that point. I wonder if anyone has looked at new subscription rates during the DTV conversion process. They certainly would have been the simplest, if not the cheapest, options at the time.