If you want substantially better pictures and sound, you’re going to have to work for it. We’ll be the first to admit it: Upgrading to digital television (DTV) and its high-end version, high-definition television (HDTV), is not as simple as adding other video technologies. The transitions from black and white to color or from an antenna to cable, for example, were relatively painless. HDTV requires a little more effort to implement, but only because the change is so much more revolutionary.

When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided that your TV picture quality needed sprucing up, it commissioned a group of manufacturers and engineering researchers, called the Advanced Television Systems Committee, to develop a better system. The FCC adopted the ATSC’s all-digital plan, which, unlike the addition of color nearly 50 years earlier, is not compatible with the existing system. The new plan is so advanced and so high-tech that the FCC gave broadcasters entirely new frequencies (or channels) to transmit the new, digital signal simultaneously. As viewers purchase new equipment, the plan goes, they will gradually switch over from the old, relatively lousy signals to the new, more spectacular ones. Provided that at least 85 percent of the population has made the transition by 2006, the FCC will pull the plug (literally) on the old analog channels. The clock’s ticking and there’s no time to waste.