Any Final Night Retrospectives?

[chime]

For quite awhile I have been wondering
what our local TV stations will
run on the evening of
Feb 17, 2009?
In the past we have seen historical
retrospectives on
channels 2, 5, 11, and 13.
Meanwhile KNBC has its 60th
scheduled at 7PM January 16.
A complicating situation for
the Networks, are that many
stations will be signing
off at midnight, so programming
their 1135PM shows would
be foolish.
Some guesses, in cases such as
channels 4-and-5, where their
UHF digital versions
are on their final channels,
maybe analog 4-and-5 would
run retrospectives or looped
announcements about tuning
to the new digital version.
Also, considering that at midnight
many sets will not have found
the altered channels,
maybe stations will sign off
from nidnight-5AM?
Thanks in advance for any info or
good guesses, from Sherman Oaks

 

[fybush]

Beyond a few brief mentions during the 10/11 PM local newscasts, I doubt you'll see much.

Look, I'm as historic-minded as anyone, but if I were programming a TV station, the last thing I'd be doing the night of 2/17 is any sort of retrospective show, especially in a market like LA where the percentage of OTA analog viewers is down in the mid-single-digits.

I've been pretty heavily involved in the DTV public education efforts here on the other side of the country, and the message we're trying very hard to send to our viewers is, "Don't worry. Take a few easy steps now, and nothing will change for your TV viewing habits on the morning of February 18."

To go on the air the night of February 17 with a special themed around "final night" and "retrospective" would undo a lot of that hard work, especially for the 82% of people in my market (or the 90-some percent in the LA market) who get their TV from cable or satellite, and for whom nothing whatsoever will change that night. They'll see Leno start at 11:35, and they'll see Leno end at 12:37, and they won't have had to do anything in the meantime.

(What's more, if current trends hold, by the time 2/17/09 rolls around, there will be a significant number of analog stations that will have already gone dark, either on purpose or because their transmission systems have failed and it's not worth replacing them...so in many markets, 2/17 will really be more of a transitional benchmark than a hard cutoff. In LA, watch KCBS and KCAL in particular - because KCAL is returning to digital channel 9 and handing its digital channel 43 over to KCBS-DT, KCAL will reduce its analog power at some point soon to begin cutting its channel 9 transmitter over to digital use, and could well decide to just get the whole job done at once to enable KCBS-DT to make an early move down from 60 to 43. Ditto, on a slightly less-complex scale, for the moves of KTTV-DT from 65 to 11 and KCOP-DT from 66 to 13.)

 

[ercjncpr]

For quite awhile I have been wondering
what our local TV stations will
run on the evening of
Feb 17, 2009?

Very likely the only thing that you will see is at midnight that night-- a sudden loss of signal on all analog channels. Remember thanks to all this digital virtual channel mapping stuff (Program and System Information Protocol), KCBS Channel 2 will still be channel 2 on everyone's digital TV and converter box, so will the others. So the average viewer will never notice that at midnight the television signal in the 54-60 MHz range has disappeared after 70 plus years and KCBS programming has suddenly shifted to 644-650 MHz.