A recent post at DTV USA Forum put the spotlight on a failed DTV test…
This morning there was test for your TVs and the dtv signal. I have cable boxes on all of my tvs and 1 HDTV.
The HDTV worked fine and got a pass signal but all of the analog tv’s with cable boxes got a clear signal with fail sign on it.
I thought if you had a cable box you would pass on an analog tv.
Two of the boxes are HDTV with DVR and 1 is a basic cable tv top of set box.I have comcast cable in the Houston area.
With the setup that this consumer just described, he should have not experienced any problems during the DTV Readiness Test (Also called “DTV Soft Test”). All of his TV sets were perfectly capable of receiving digital television signals.
So what’s the problem?
An ABC Houston news station (KTRK Channel 13) delicately stated,
All along we have been saying cable and satellite customers don’t need to do anything to receive digital signals and they should not have seen the fail message, but apparently technical problems caused the fail message to appear on channels 2, 8, and 39. Even those who should not have seen it got the fail message.
Comcast engineers “apparently” had problems during the soft test that caused some viewers with Comcast cable to receive fail messages even though their televisions were equipped to handle DTV signals.
The Comcast problem wasn’t geographically limited to Houston either. A recent blogpost out of Boston based UniversalHub.com explained the Comcast phenomena more directly,
If you have an analog TV and analog Comcast cable service without a converter box, and you turn on WGBH-TV-2 right now, you’re going to see something very wrong: video of normal WGBH programming, accompanied by audio of WGBH’s continuously-looping Ready for Digital TV special.
…WGBH says this is a “Comcast engineering problem”, not a problem with WGBH’s broadcast or with your TV set.
There’s no doubt that the transition to digital television is confusing enough as is, but when you thow a botched DTV readiness test into the mix, consumers are going to be less likely to embrace this new technology with open arms.
