Craig Birkmaier wrote: > Most countries are NOT mandating tuners in new TV's/Monitors. Most countries have not shut off analog TV either. The "tuner mandate" is the technique used in the US to move the DTV transition forward. Same technique was used for introducing UHF in the early 1960s. Ultimately, the UHF tuner became integrated all over the world. So far, Germany is the only country where analog shutoff was successful in anything but small trial regions. Their mechanism was the progressive shutdown of analog stations. That forced people to switch. Italy failed to meet their 31 July analog shutdown in Valle d'Aosta and Sardegna, the specific reason being an inadequate penetration of DTT receivers. This in spite of the road shows and public announcements. Their new strategy in those regions is to begin a phased analog shutdown, starting on 1 March 2007. We'll see. I suppose the FCC could have taken that same approach, vs the "tuner mandate," although it's not clear to me whether either approach is obviously preferable. I find it interesting, though, that both countries picked 1 March 2007 as the date to start getting serious about ending the transition. In the end, whatever approach is used, DTV receivers will be integrated in sets anyway. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.