Memo to D.C.: The DTV transition has already happened

Believe it or not, we still have two more months until DTV Deux, when all the analog TV signals in the blah BLAH blah ... man, am I sick of writing about the digital TV transition. And always having to explain what it is. To whom, exactly? Who at this point does not understand what a DTV Transition is? If all you know is, "I can't get TV on my old set unless I get cable or a box at RadioShack," bing, good enough!

Take a look at this chart just out from Nielsen. It shows the readiness of the country right now for DTV:

I call your attention to the bottom-right cell, showing the "unreadiness" (aka, no clue) category among the 55-plussers who make up a disproportionate amount of the voting public, and who were supposedly the reason for the congressional freakout that led to the DTV Delay Act. That's margin-of-error territory, folks. Older Americans are more ready to watch TV than they are to retire. I'm not sure what that says about national priorities but I do know what it says about the idiocy of making broadcasters keep the lights on at their analog transmitters one more minute.

In Kansas City, 1.7 percent of all households are considered "completely unready" by Nielsen. Drilling deeper, we find that 90.5 percent of all TV sets are receiving DTV and we know that most of the 9.5 percent that aren't probably never will be, because they're for gaming or VHS watching (remember those?).

In short, I'm more likely to hear from readers who missed our transition to a paid Sunday TV book (so far, one) than from readers who missed the DTV transition.