TVs will go blank for 2 minutes for three days

[shrutigoyal]

Our TV set will go blank for two minutes on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. In a strategy to persuade viewers to shift to digital systems, all broadcasters will switch off transmission simultaneously at 7:58 pm, 8:58 pm and 9:58 pm for the next three days.

All channels will stop programming to show a 30-second advertisement in Hindi and English informing viewers to change to digital set top boxes before October 31. The advertisement ends with the warning "Go digital or go blank" in English and "Set top box lagaye ya TV bhool jaye" in Hindi.

The blackout has been planned for the four metros: Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, where the first phase of digitization is expected to kick in from November 1. The deadline for shifting to digital was June 30 but it could not be met due to a several reasons, including a lack of set top boxes and other procedural problems.

In the four metros about 50,000 set top boxes are being seeded every week with Mumbai showing maximum progress. There are about 10-12 million TV homes in the four metros of which over 50% have been digitized so far.

[chatpati]

Good idea. Hopefully now we should be able to get a fairer idea of TRPs, because of Digital.

[vikram sharma]

yeah, less cheating.