Tuesday, several television stations throughout the United States cut their analog signals in order to perform the transition to digital broadcasting only, while others have decided to wallow in the grace period passed by Congress and thus wait until June 12 to make the switch.

For years now, both the U.S. government and the industry have been saying that the February 17 was to be the day when the transition would be made, yet issues arising one after the other prompted the Congress to postpone the switch to digital TV.

The major problem occurred when the government ran out of funds aimed at providing coupons to subsidize TV converter boxes, which translated as many people coming to be likely to lose signal.

Consequently, due to the fact that people were not ready for the transition and had not properly been prepared for it, the Congress passed a bill to delay the deadline to June 12, yet it also allowed TV stations to keep the February 17 date if they wished to do so.

Nevertheless, at the beginning of this month, approximately a third of U.S. full-power stations announced that they wanted to keep to the February 17 deadline, which rendered the Congress to draw up some conditions where some of them were concerned.

Therefore, it was only on Friday that the news regarding which stations were to shut down their analog signals today was brought forth.

A string of 641 stations across the nation have already cut their analog signals or are scheduled to do so during this week, the majority of them being in populated areas including San Diego and Santa Barbara, California, Providence, Rhode Island, La Crosse and Madison, Wisconsin, Rockford, Illinois, Sioux City, Iowa, Waco, Texas, Macon, Georgia, Scranton, Pennsylvania and Burlington, Vermont.