This past Tuesday night at PBS TV station WHYY, I spoke before the Philadelphia chapter of SMPTE on the status of the digital TV transition, along with industry guru Mark Schubin.

At this point, "D-Day, Take 2" seems anti-climatic. On June 12, all full-power TV stations will finally shut down their analog (NTSC) TV transmitters, some after 60+ years of operation (600+ stations have already pulled the plug!). TV broadcasts in the United States will have gone completely digital, except for translator and low-power TV stations that are still off the hook for a few years.

When the DTV transition started back in 1997, HDTV was the motivating force. Today, it’s almost an afterthought, what with many TV stations fighting for their lives and struggling with declining audiences and ad revenue. The "buzz" that once followed HDTV has now largely shifted to Internet-delivered video from sites like YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, which just added ABC/Disney to its list of investors.

The FCC and Congress couldn’t have foreseen the tremendous changes in television broadcasting that have transpired over the past 13 years. But they still managed to elevate bureaucratic bungling to a new level along the way. Consider these examples

● The NTIA coupon program ran out of money and coupons several months before the original shutdown date of February 17.  Ironically, NTIA originally mailed what turned out to be too many coupons (two per household, which half on average never redeemed).

● The FCC completely forgot about the exemptions granted to translator and low-power TV stations.  The result?  A slew of converter boxes that would not pass through NTSC signals until the FCC asked for voluntary product modifications in the spring of 2008.

● President Obama’s administration convinced Congress to allocate another $650M to the NTIA coupon program this past February and get it across the finish line.  Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) sagely observed that, “…if the transition program uses all of that money, they’ve managed to spend $1,000 per household for a device that costs $50.”

● On May 8, the FCC announced that a new service of digital TV translators would be authorized to allow broadcasters to fill in signal coverage gaps resulting from the shutdown of analog TV stations.  These are not to be confused with existing analog TV translators that don’t have to go digital yet.

According to Nielsen, about 3.3 million homes still haven’t upgraded their TVs or bought at least one converter box. So, the FCC is leaving no stone unturned, launching a last minute "hit the streets" campaign to round up the strays and staffing the FCC DTV Transition call center with 4,000 troubleshooters.

A story in yesterday’s Washington Post says that the FCC is mounting a concerted PR effort in TV markets with low converter box penetration, and also enlisting the help of a firefighters union to go door-to-door to install converter boxes. In other markets, the Boy Scouts and AmeriCorps volunteers have been brought in for this purpose (Perhaps they should have called the program "No TV Left Behind?").

Finally, the FCC is trying to set up one last "soft test" for Thursday, May 21, with analog stations shutting down briefly in the hopes of motivating laggards to get with the DTV program. Since February 12, the analog TV shutdown has been analogous to the parent who warns a recalcitrant child that they’ll count to three, or else…except that the parent starts splitting hairs, counting "two and a half…two and three-quarters…two and seven-eighths…"

When all is said and done, this momentous event in U.S. history will have ended largely with a whimper, and not a bang. There’s no clear picture on the future of digital terrestrial television: Some pundits at NAB said that mobile DTV delivery may be all that’s left ten years from now, given the steady decline in audiences and revenues.

And that possibility begs this question: Was a government-mandated transition to digital TV even necessary, or would a combination of the marketplace and rapid technological changes in digital media distribution have forced the issue anyway? We’ll never know, but at least we can be assured that Congress hasn’t lost its touch in spending billions of our hard-earned dollars with mixed results…