Thursday, October 18, 2007

Analog TVs Kicked to the Curb

Yesterday Best Buy announced that it pulled its analog TVs off the floor. This is in anticipation of February 18th, 2009, when broadcasters will end analog transmissions.

    Non-digital television sets that are not attached to a cable or satellite service and not equipped with special converter boxes will no longer work.

    Best Buy is the first consumer-electronics retailer to report an exit from the analog-TV business. More than 60 million U.S. households currently rely on an antennas or analog cable, and cable operators are required to guarantee their customers will receive broadcast channels until February 2012.

I'm pretty sure our TV is analog. Just the other day we had to get another little machine to connect a "new" hand-me-down DVD player to the TV because the TV connection was so Roman Empire era. I'm big on secondhand TVs off of craigslist, tend to inherit them from friends upgrading, and don't have cable, so before this article the only thing I cared about was that my TV wasn't black and white and it had a remote. But no more signal? Maybe by 2009 there will be a fire sale on flat screens.

1 comment:

Ms. M&P said...

Maybe you'll luck out and get a nice flat screen on Craigslist in the next year ;) I never even thought to get TVs secondhand, but that's a great idea. They're kind of like cars--depreciate as soon as you get them.