As if hooking up the TV wasn't difficult enough...

A lot of people believe involving the government in anything makes it that much harder, due to bureaucratic inefficiency (or incompetency, depending on whom you ask). Well, that axiom is about to apply to my TV, thanks to the upcoming transition to all-digital frequencies in 2009.

Here's the story: Analog television broadcasting shares the same airwaves with public safety communications (fire and police departments, rescue squads, etc.). In order to free up some of the airwaves for emergency services, the federal government is mandating a switch of all analog broadcasting to digital by February 2009. This means anyone who gets their television signals from an antenna (yes, some of us still use rabbit ears!) will need to either get a digital converter box, or subscribe to a digital cable service.

My roommate and I have cable in the living room, but the TV in my bedroom is not hooked up to it, and it would require more effort than I'm willing to spend to connect it. The living room cable connection is on an interior wall in our apartment, and to avoid running a cable across three doorways—or four, if I took it in the other direction—I'd have to run a cable around the baseboards of nearly the entire living room, through the foyer, across the front door and a closet (there's no way to avoid at least two doorways) and into my room.

Way too much work, when my antenna works well enough for the amount of TV I watch. NBC is sometimes a little fuzzy (which isn't good for Heroes!), but generally the channels I watch come in quite well.

But that's not all. I have TIVO, which means I have more cords to connect than my TV has outlets for. My TV is an older (read: simpler) model, with only "Antenna In" and "Antenna Out" connections, so I need a converter box to hook up my TIVO (or VCR, or DVD player).

So here are the connections I have right now: 

1. Antenna to converter box

2. Converter box to TIVO (two cords here)

3. TIVO to TV, and 

4. The TV, of course, to the electrical outlet. 

There's also another connection: my TIVO has to get its programming from either a telephone landline or the internet. The landline got to be too expensive just for TV programming, and the internet connection, like cable, is in the living room. So my TIVO is also connected to an antenna to get signals from our wireless internet router.

Is it any wonder I never bothered to hook up my VCR?

Now the government wants me to hook up one more box, adding two more cords to the mass I already have behind my TV cart. I'm strongly considering getting a new digital-compliant TV, just to eliminate two boxes and a couple of cords. Maybe when the IRS sends my tax refund, I'll go TV shopping!