The digital TV transition has occurred.  It was deja vu all over again.  Remembrance of Y2K, when everyone was freaked out that the world, dependent on computers, would shut down.

Well, it didn’t come to a halt nine and a half years ago and it didn’t today.  After years of preparation, hundreds of thousands of dollars of advertising and months of delay, there was scarcely a whimper from the public which was supposed to be unprepared for the shutoff of analog TV broadcasts.

And, like Y2K, the government erred on the side of overreaction.

Today at Channel 6, as per FCC “suggestion”, we set up  a phone bank manned to handle the volume of calls expected to pour in after we shut off our analog transmitter.  We had staffers trained and ready to handle the panicked public who suddenly discovered they could no longer see free television on their older sets.

The number of calls throughout the ten hours the phone bank was manned was around 72.  A dozen of them were legitimate calls from folks that needed help rescanning converter boxes or adjusting antennae.  The bigger issue was the sudden discovery that the ability to hear the channel 6 audio on the FM radio band also disappeared,  They really had the most people upset – 60 calls and, at this point, around a couple dozen e-mails.

It’s difficult to explain why they are no longer able to hear WRTV on 87.7FM.  And, it’s even more difficult for them to understand why we don’t just get another radio station and put the audio there.  No worry about copyrights, program licenses and other small issues. Or the availability of radio broadcast frequencies.

We could put our local newscasts, for which we own all the content, on an existing station and have put feelers out to some local stations.  No takers.

But, it is gratifying to know that so many people came to depend on listening to WRTV on radio during their commutes and during the day when shuttling kids to and from school and sports practices.

I wish we could accomodate them.