President-elect Barack Obama requested the Congress to pass a bill in order to delay the digital television implementation across the United States for another three months. The previous bill had stated that the deadline for analog to digital signal transition would have been mid-February.

The authorities have to deal with a complicated situation, since they cannot override the initial program but there is still a large number of people who hasn’t done the switch so far.

However, the Republicans have publicly rejected the idea of a new deadline, which was suggest by Democrat of West Virginia, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, as he submitted a bill that scheduled the transition limit to June 12, 2009. Rockefeller stated that he would resubmit his bill in a week’s time, after the Republicans had declined his plan.

Lawmakers are not very happy with the current state of affairs, as the company Nielsen Media Research estimated that there are still 7.8 million households in the U.S. that have not upgraded their TV setup in order to receive digital signals.

Even though authorities insist that every American should comply and switch to the new technology, analysts say that people who watch TV through satellite and cable will not be affected by the signal switch. On the other hand, it seems that this will not be the case for households that still have analog antennas, as a digital converter box is needed for signal transfer.