tvs were required to have digital tuners on june 12, 2009.
when were tvs required to have digital tuners?
june 12 , 2009
as the original american digital television transition date of 17 february 2009 approached, xetv had expressed intentions to follow other san diego-area stations in ceasing transmission of its analog signal. while the u.s. switchover deadline of 17 february was later pushed back to june 12, 2009, and only applied to american-licensed stations in any case, plans were announced to voluntarily make the station's english-language programming digital-only. the analog signal would be repurposed to retransmit the mexican galavisión network (not to be confused with the american cable channel of the same name). claims on xetv's website that the station was indeed going to transmit a digitally-exclusive signal were rescinded on 17 february 2009 as the station decided to delay cutting off its analog signal until after it secured approval from the mexican government. xetv management later stated that it had decided to maintain its analog signal to benefit mexican viewers. xetv's analog signal was eventually repurposed on march 2, 2012, when the station began multicasting on its digital signal with the addition of televisa's youth-oriented canal 5 network on subchannel 6.2 and on its analog feed, while digital channel 6.1 retained the newscasts, cw network and syndicated programs in english. on the same date, xhbj-tv channel 45 dropped canal 5 for galavisión. canal 5 replaced xetv's english-language programming on its analog signal, in order to serve spanish-speaking viewers in tijuana that did not have television sets with built-in digital tuners or digital converter boxes prior to the tijuana market's 2013 transition to digital television. the affiliation switch coincided with the commencement of digital multicasting on televisa's tijuana stations. canal 5 moved to its primary channel on may 31, 2017, at which point, the 6.2 subchannel was decommissioned.
xetv-tdt
after ending the analogue catv transmissions, an (analogue) cable-ready tv or vcr is no longer be able to tune cable channels directly. a customer needs to install a digital cable box or a digital television adapter (which is a very basic kind of digital cable box). newer tvs, however, often feature digital tuners including digital cable tuners (qam for usa, dvb-c for europe). but cable providers often encrypt all of most of the channels, causing the tv to be unable to receive these channels directly. in usa, there were tvs with cablecard slot to allow decryption without a cable box. however, they are now gone. but there are other devices like tivo that can accept a cablecard and decrypt channels the customer subscribes to without need of a cable box.
cable converter box