One year from today, February 17, 2009, television stations around the country, including WEEK, will be turning off their analogue signals.

We will be broadcasting in digital.

Here's a grade school description of how WEEK gets into your TV at home. We do our news in front of a camera. The camera picture and sound go through cables on the studio floor and into some very expensive broadcast equipment. The TV signal is then fired out over the airwaves from our tower high in the sky over our station in East Peoria.

Our signal comes in your home. That's been the basic set up since the advent of television in the late 1940's. In one year, every TV station in America will change to a digital broadcast only. For the viewer, it will mean better picture and sound and more products from each station.

WEEK-TV General Manager Mark DeSantis said, "With digital transmitters we now have we can broadcast the high definition signal and yet still have room in the band width to provide up to four or five separate channels of programming simultaneously."

But you may need to make some decisions on how you receive the new digital signal. One option is to go buy a new digital TV with a digital turner. If you want to keep your old style analogue TV, you'll need a converter box.

This is an example of the converter box the government is going to give you a coupon to help pay for. If you still want to watch Rachael Ray for free using your rabbit ears, you'll simply hook up the antenna on top to the converter box, then run a cable line out of the box into your analogue TV and you'll continue to watch TV like you always have for free.

Cable companies will continue to provide both signals, so you don't have to do anything.

ComCast District Director John Niebur said, "There are two different signals out there. A digital standard definition signal and an H-D signal. The standard definition signal will continue to convert that back to an analogue for customers so they don't have to go out and buy a special tuner to make that happen or a new TV set."

Let's rewind: If you watch TV using an antenna with an old style TV... you will need a converter box to change that digital signal into an analogue signal.

If you subscribe to cable, the cable company will do the conversion for you.. no converter box, no need for a new digital TV, for now.

And the same goes for Satellite TV subscribers.. the satellite company will be doing the signal conversion for analogue tv owners... at least until those old analogue TV's all quit working and up being recycled or trashed.

People will have to upgrade to the new technology. And demand creates lower prices and those digital TV sets are becoming pretty reasonable price wise compared to a couple years ago.

The digital age of TV... considered the next big chapter in broadcast history is now just one year away.