As reported earlier, there was the first major test of the DTV Transition in Wilmington on Monday. Things largely seemed to go well, with a few exceptions. Ironically, since cable was originally built on delivering better reception, people seemed to have had some issues with clear reception of digital television.

Here is some of the coverage:

• Charlotte Observer
• Light Reading’s Cable Digital News
• Elon University’s The Pendulum

One takeaway from the event was that there seemed to be very high awareness of the transition, but there also continues to be some confusion between the digital transition involving over-the-air broadcast stations and the digital transition that cable operators have been conducting for a few years.

For example, here’s a recent post from the Cultured State blog: The 2009 Digital TV Transition: Flirting With Disaster. The author insists that “the cable television industry isn’t telling the whole truth on what’s about to happen to your cable service.” The false charge is leveled that you won’t be able to continue to receive your cable signal unless you have a set-top box or a Digital Cable Ready TV. Proof is offered in the form of a July article from MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan.

As it so happens, I’ve already addressed Sullivan’s piece:

Bob Sullivan, senior writer for MSNBC.com’s Technology section, posted an article today entitled “The ‘Other’ Digital TV Conversion Might Cost You,” which purportedly attempts to clear up some confusion about the coming Digital Television transition. In fact, it simply sows more confusion. Sullivan has tried to establish (falsely) a direct relationship between the upcoming “DTV Transition” and efforts by cable operators to expand their video offerings and enhance other services.

Read the whole thing for the full explanation, but suffice to say that cable needs to manage its bandwidth, which is why we see things like switched digital video or channels being moved from analog tiers to digital. This has been going on for some time and has nothing to do with the Digital TV Transition of next February.

A sinister portrait is painted of the cable industry’s intentions regarding set-top boxes. I will simply refer you to comments I made to the TV Barn blog:

“If you switched to DirecTV or Dish, you have to have a new box. If you switch to Verizon FiOS or AT&T’s U-verse, you have to have a new box. It baffles me to no end why there are four companies competing with cable and nobody has ever complained that you have to have a set-top box for them.”

Michael Marcus at the Spectrum Talk blog also has concerns: 6 Months to Go and Some DTV Confusion Continues. He tries to wade through a variety of website, but concludes, “…if you have your analog TV set connected directly to the cable system and select channels directly with your TV set tuner, you might be in trouble in the near future.”

What he’s referring to is that cable operators have offered to carry local broadcast signals on analog tiers for three years, unless the cable system goes all-digital. This does not seem to be sufficient for him:

Note that the FCC requirement only deals with local over-the-air signals (e.g. signals from NAB and MSTV members), not C-SPAN, CNN, The Food Network, etc. So the quote from the DTV Transition Coalition above (actually linked through the NCTA site) that says “TV sets that currently receive programming through cable or satellite are not likely to be affected by the transition to digital.” is at best a half truth. So is the FCC quote, “Analog TVs will continue to work with cable, satellite, VCRs, DVD players, camcorders, video games consoles and other devices for many years”. But if your idea of TV is limited to what the 15% of American homes without cable or satellite actually see, then the information is correct.

Once again, we’ve got apples and oranges. The Transition is about over-the-air broadcast stations. If cable channels have to be moved from analog to digital, that is a completely separate issue.