The Digital Switch Over – Who Knew?

According to a study into the transition from analogue to digital, a surprisingly small number of consumers and even sales staff, fully understand the digital switch over. Despite this, the scheduled switch is still on target to take place in 2012. Many consumers are expected to require additional hardware in order to make TVs they’ve purchased this year work after the switch.

The digital tick campaign ensures that all new digital television sets are accompanied by the purple tick. Confusion still seems to remain, however, with sales staff as well as consumers fully unaware of what it actually means. As a result, many of the TVs sold this year were analogue – although 87% of all household TVs are now believed to be digital.

Analogue TVs can be converted to digital relatively inexpensively. A £25 digital set top box will connect to an analogue set and convert it so that it can be used after the switchover. Without this conversion, though, analogue televisions will become completely obsolete. That’s currently 26 million televisions.

It is believed that some of these analogue televisions have been purchased solely for use with DVD players and games consoles but it’s difficult to imagine so many used for such a limited purpose.