November Editorial: Answer the phone!
What will you be doing on the morning of Feb. 17, 2009?
I’m guessing a lot of Broadcast Engineering readers will be answering viewer telephone calls. Those callers will be asking, “Where’s your signal? Are you off the air?”
After you explain that the station is still transmitting, but only in digital, what do you say to, “What do I have to do in order to get your signal?”
A community-wide analog shutoff test was conducted two months ago in Wilmington, NC. The results showed that despite massive promotion, viewers were hardly ready for DTV.
Elon University’s associate dean of the School of Communications, Connie Book, initiated a research project where students documented the stations’ switchover and then collected demographic and DTV-relevant information from viewers who called the stations for help during the test.
