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Wilmington Tests Digital Switch; Nielsen Tests A/P Meter in All-Digital Enviro

Wilmington, North Carolina, became the first market to make the transition to digital TV transmission, when its two stations switched from analog to digital signals at noon yesterday, a full six months before the rest of the country will switch on Feb. 17, 2009.

Broadcasters received scores of calls from residents who weren’t prepared for the switch, or who couldn’t get the set-top boxes designed to allow older TVs to receive digital signals to work, writes The Wall Street Journal. Most of the 74 calls that were received at the Fox affiliate and NBC affiliate were from those who needed help hooking up or programming their set-top boxes. The National Association of Broadcasters has conducted awareness studies in Wilmington and reported that 97 percent of households knew about the upcoming switch.

About 8 percent of households in Wilmington and surrounding areas - or about 14,000 households - relied solely on over-the-air broadcasting and needed a converter box or new television, according to Nielsen. Nationally, 13 million households rely on over-the-air signals.

Federal officials and broadcasters are watching Wilmington - a city that agreed to switch early to serve as a test for the rest of the country - closely to get a sense of how smoothly the transition will go and to learn what needs to be done to make the national switch go well.

Nielsen took the opportunity to test its A/P meter in the all-digital environment. Wilmington is a diary-only market, but the two stations agreed to follow the same steps that metered market stations will take once they, too, make the transition to digital-only, according to Adweek.

Nielsen plans to share the results of the test when they have been evaluated.