The country is beginning to hear about the coming Digital Television transition. Unfortunately, there are continuing areas of confusion, even (as pointed out previously) among experts. One of the key points that trip up people is that there are really two transitions. Let’s make one thing clear up front. If you get television from a cable operator (or one of our competitors), you probably lump all those channels together: CNN, Fox, Lifetime, ABC, it’s all the same, right? But some channels are from broadcast stations in your area: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, The CW. Those other channels, such as MTV and ESPN, are cable channels. The high-profile DTV Transition coming in February 2009 — as full power over-the-air broadcast TV stations switch to digital and turn off their analog broadcast signal — is the broadcast industry’s digital transition. And although cable is playing a role in that, the cable industry is going through its own transition. Let me explain the difference.

The broadcasters’ transition is about digital television, where the picture and sound information is expressed in the form of data bits representing, for example, a “1” or a “0”. You can think of this transition as analogous to the transition from vinyl records to CDs.

Cable operators are also transitioning some analog channels onto digital cable tiers in order to reclaim space. With digital cable, compression technology is used to allow more than one program service to be carried in the bandwidth space normally required for one analog program service. Typically, the signal is sent to the home, decompressed in the set-top box and changed into analog signals for display on the television. You can think of this transition as something like the manner in which you can compress large files for easier downloading, and then you decompress them for viewing.

Your local TV stations are offered in hi-def formats on digital cable, but digital TV and digital cable are two different animals.

As we’ve discussed before, part of the DTV Transition will require that you get a digital-to-analog converter box to continue watching full power over-the-air broadcast TV stations on an analog TV set. If all your TV sets are connected to cable, you won’t need to do anything to continue to watch your local broadcast stations.

However, some popular cable channels are only available on cable’s digital tiers. In addition, other popular cable channels may be moving from the analog tier to the digital tier because channel space is limited. In these circumstances, you may want to move up to digital service from your cable company — and a digital cable set-top box. But don’t confuse cable’s digital migration with the broadcasters’ digital TV transition.

There’s no denying that the Digital Television Transition is a complicated issue. Even those of us who work on it all the time sometimes have difficulty keeping all of the technical details straight. Some people seem confused over whether a box is always necessary to keep watching TV.

Here’s one example. Earlier this week, on a Public Radio program dealing with current technology issues, that subject of the coming DTV transition was discussed:

Host: How do I make sure that my TV doesn’t go blank on February 17?

Guest: What you have to do is look at how TV gets to your TV. If you subscribe to satellite or you subscribe to cable, and in either case you have a box, some kind of tuner or digital video recorder connected to your TV, you don’t have to do anything. Any digital conversion that is necessary is done in that box. At worst, your cable or satellite company will ship you a new box at some point. The tricky issue is people who either…

Host: Have cable without a box.

Guest: Yes. They have a cable ready TV and they just subscribe to basic or expanded basic so that they’re used to the joy of watching TV with only remote control on the coffee table. They may need to get a box where they didn’t have one before because the cable companies - and this is actually separate from the digital transition in a certain sense - they only have to keep providing a very basic set of channels in an unencrypted analog form that you can get with your cable ready TV.

Here’s another example: In the latest edition of the Bose newsletter, there’s the same error. It says that you’ll need to do nothing for the transition if “You subscribe to digital cable TV.” Further down, it states that it is a “Myth” that cable subscribers are ready for the changeover, suggesting that cable subscribers who receive analog service will be left out.

The source of the confusion seems to be that two topics are combined. It’s important to remember that this DTV Transition is only for the over-the-air broadcast industry. Cable is going through its own “digital transition.” Because of that word “digital,” the two often get confused.

What will cable subscribers need to do in preparation for the DTV Transition next February? The current information is that cable customers - whether or not they have a set-top box - will still be able to watch television after Feb. 17, 2009. At the same time, the cable industry has been moving towards a digital platform; as part of that, sometimes operators will move channels from the analog tier to the digital tier, which then needs a digital set-top box for reception.

Bottom line: If you have cable service, you should be fine, with the set-top box as an irrelevant factor. However, if you want to get access to cable’s newer services, such as hi-def TV or digital video recorders, or if you want to see the hundreds of programming choices available through the digital cable platform, you’ll need to have the appropriate set-top box. You can avoid having a box by purchasing a Digital Cable Ready television, but the current sets are only one-way, which means you won’t have access to interactive services. However, the tru2way standard will address this issue.

As always, you can visit the Get Ready for Digital TV site for more information (también en Español).

Even though this is a gadget show, content’s role at CES increases with each successive year. Which makes sense, because most consumers ultimately don’t care about technology, they care about what they can accomplish with it.

If you shell out for a new HDTV, what you care about is being to watch compelling hi-def programming. That’s one reason that Comcast’s Brian Roberts talked about putting 1,000 HD “choices” in customers’ homes by the end of 2008 (some media outlets erroneously reported this as 1,000 channels) and about rolling out a new system architecture by the end of the year that will let Comcast make half of 6,000 monthly On Demand movie options available in high definition.

(By the way, this is especially important for you if you paid a lot for your TV.  The Cox Digital Straight Talk blog reports that Panasonic has sold more than 3,000 of the 103-inch plasma displays they showed at last year’s CES, at a price of $51,000 each.)

The same goes for your home computer. If you can watch video, whether streaming or downloaded, then you want as many available choices as possible. I often assume that if I can watch a show on TV, then there must be some way for me to watch that same show online, but that isn’t always true.

That topic came up at the CES panel “The True Cost of DRM: What Can’t We Do Now?,” as it had earlier, with some comparison of digital rights management as it has evolved for music, as opposed to the current state of DRM for video.

[Russell Frackman, Partner, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp] took issue with [American University's Patricia] Aufderheide’s singling out of Viacom. “What about the other side of the equation? How much are YouTube and Google going to pay?” he asked.

“They built a filter Viacom didn’t pay for,” countered [Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Fred] von Lohmann.

That’s one way of looking at it: A streaming video service may not have paid for rights-controlled content, but the rightholder didn’t pay for the actions of tracking down their content and then taking it off the service.

The process of moving toward a future in which viewers can watch any piece of content ever made at any time on any device will be a slow, incremental process.  The amount of available content increases all the time and that’s a good thing for everybody.