i think that it is a good idea as long as it is well publisized and everyone knows that it is happening and what to do. also i think every area needs to be assured of good coverage which at the moment is not true!
i think that most houses allready have digital tv so i'm not sure it is going to be too stressful for most people. even my very elderly in-laws have freeview so i don't think it will cause too much confusion. we have 5 tv's and four of them have freeview & one of them has cable tv.
As a paid up member of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" brigade, I was against the change to digital TV at first. However I've been won over by the greater range of channels it allows.
There are technical reasons for the switchover. With the digital system, many transmitters can share the same frequency allowing many more channels within the same band. This allows new channels or leaves spare capacity for the government to sell off or a combination of the two (and that's what's happening - the so-called "digital dividend" will result in a windfall for the Treasury while we get a few more channels, but less than we could have had). Analogue TV has to go eventually for digital to achieve its full performance. The digital transmitters are not transmitting at full power as that would interfere with analogue on the adjacent channels. When analogue is turned off, digital transmitters will crank up to the max and coverage will be better.
One unfortunate aspect of digital TV is that the quality of digiboxes is not as high as it could be, probably due to cutting costs to get people to buy them. I've had several digiboxes die after less than two years and so have my parents, whereas an analogue TV would last much longer.
P.S I am an engineer but I do not work in the TV industry so I am not pushing any agenda here.
I think I liked the idea of the switch over but wasn't keen on the fact we had to buy the box to do it. It has been a while since I looked at any prices so it might have gone down, but I have just been waiting for the TV to suddenly not work since I thought it was to have happened by now. I agree there certainly needs to be more publicity for it since I will admit that I am still a touch confused as to what it all means lol!
Television