Berlin first for all-digital TV

net1

Berlin became the first city in the world to switch off its analogue broadcast signal and transfer completely to digital TV.

The transition was pretty smooth, said Sascha Bakarinow, project leader for the switch to digital at the Media Institution Berlin-Brandenburg (MABB). "We've only had about 500 phone calls to our hotline, most of them asking standard questions about how to operate the set-top box," Bakarinow said. "A few others were welfare recipients who wanted to know if they could get a set-top box paid for by the government."

The analogue switch-off was helped by the fact that, of Berlin's 1.8 million households, 1.5 million are already cable subscribers, and about 150,000 households have satellite dishes, officials said. None of these households are affected by the switch. In addition, MABB said that about 150,000 digital set-top boxes were sold in Berlin during the "test phase" over the past six months. Any non-cable or satellite customer who didn't have a relatively new TV set or had not yet bought a set-top box to translate the digital signals to analogue was staring at a blank screen Monday, though Bakarinow said that was limited to very few users.

mill9

If they can do it so can we........