Joel Topcik: Hi, I am Joel Topcik from Broadcasting & Cable magazine. We are talking about how you can prepare for the digital television transition. In this segment, John Taylor from LG Electronics will provide a demonstration of over-the-air digital TV and walk you through the installation of a digital-to-analog converter box, which will allow you to watch digital broadcasts on an analog TV.
John Taylor: I am thrilled to be here today to talk about the digital-to-analog convertor boxes that will help consumers make this transition to digital television. You know millions of Americans watch analog TV today using an antenna. This is a ten year old TV that uses an analog antenna. As you will see, when as you watch the various channels in analog, it's prone to snow and goes at the interference, just flipping through some of the local stations; some coming better than others. You can adjust the antenna. We've been doing this since the dawn of television. What digital brings though will be a crisp picture like a DVD quality picture and let me show you how we set that up.
About three dozen digital-to-analog convertor boxes have been certified by the NTIA. This is the Zenith box, one of the most popular ones. This is available through RadioShack, Circuit City lots of other retailers. Very similar box will be available through Best Buy. When you get it home, first thing you'll see when you open it up is a quick setup guide; ours is in English and Spanish, very simple way to show how to hook it up. In addition, of course it has an operating guide again in English and Spanish. The box itself is a handsome little design. Very simple to use which I'll show how to install in just a second, and also has included a remote control including the batteries as well as all the cables you need to hook it up; an antenna cable as well as audio video cables if you like stereo sound.
Connecting your new convertor box is really simple; probably the biggest challenge is turning the year-old analog TV around so you can get to the antenna inputs. Now that we've turned the analog TV around, I've plugged in the convertor box; let me show you how easy it is to hook up. First, you disconnect the antenna from the television set and connect it to the antenna input of the convertor box. Next, you take the antenna output from the convertor box back to the antenna input of the TV. The same way we've hooked up a VCR for the last 25 years. If your analog TV has audio jacks for stereo sound, the convertor box will provide that as well. So all you need to do is hook up the stereo cables to the left and right, output jacks of the box to the left and right, input jacks on your TV, then you'll have a stereo sound.
Now that we've hooked up the convertor box, I've turned the TV around again and let me show you how we scan the channels. First, you turn the convertor box. Turn on the TV. You want to tune the TV to channel 3 or 4, just like a VCR. First thing you'll see is an quick install guide, a welcome screen and you just kind of walk through the process. I am going to choose English as my language, but this box also has the menus in Spanish and French. To search for channels, you push a button and this will go through - remember, this is receiving digital broadcasting through the same antenna that this old TV used to receive the analog broadcasting.
So right now, it's searching for the new digital channels. Searching for digital channels takes under a minute and in our case we found over 25 digital channels available. From here, you have a crystal clear digital picture, remember the snow, the ghost, the interference we had with the analog signal. Now that the digital signal is coming through the same antenna, through the convertor box, you get this nearly DVD quality picture, not only is that a better picture, but you get more programming. So that's it, your digital-to-analog convertor box is really easy to set up, so you are well prepared for the transition to digital television on February 17th of 2009. Thank you for watching.
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