DTV transition: Why?

I asked this in the ongoing Pit thread, but as I should have anticipated, people are too involved sniping at each other to actually answer the question. Or maybe there isn’t an answer. Or maybe the answer is just so blatantly obvious that I am an idiot for asking the question in the first place, and everyone is just being too polite to say so.

So here’s my question:

Can someone explain exactly what the benefit is of stopping analog transmission? I’ve seen a few vague references to “the bandwidth is needed for other purposes,” but I am unclear on what purposes. If I knew why it was necessary for analog transmissions to stop, I might feel less irked about the whole thing.

Here’s the government website about it.

The benefit is that you can broadcast the same amount of content using a much smaller amount of the available broadcast spectrum. There are only so many frequencies that you can transmit video data on. By moving all the current broadcasters to digital, a lot of the spectrum that is currently being used gets freed up for (a) reuse by other government agencies and (b) sale to business entities. You can decide for yourself the degree of importance of those 2 reasons.

ETA: The broadcast spectrum is pretty crowded at the moment. There are a lot of new services people would/may desire, such as wireless broadband service, which are difficult to provide because there’s no bandwidth available for it. This is a method to free up bandwidth for those services, without completely cutting off other existing services.

Thanks, muldoonthief. My ignorance has successfully been fought.

Another reason that the government may be so gung ho about this is that DTV makes it easier to implement and enforce things like the Broadcast Flag and DRM. I can imagine there’s pretty heavy lobbying from the media industry for this migration to happen. Going digital also helps plug the infamous analog hole which has allowed consumers to bypass copy protection schemes.

Disclaimer: I don’t have cites handy for this; it’s speculation, but based on known and publicly disclosed agendas.

Also stations don’t want to maintain 2 types of equipment.

It actually barely affects the analog hole, and in fact it makes it much wider rather than plug it. You can get a standalone ATSC tuner with analog outputs for peanuts with a government coupon (if you were lucky enough to get one). Try finding a standalone NTSC tuner with analog output that’s not part of a VCR.