There’s a lot of buzz – most of it negative – coming out of the US at the moment about the country’s imminent analogue TV switchoff on February 17, 2009.

America is doing it the hard way – the whole country’s being switched off in one go – which has given rise to much talk about the potential for a large number of ‘digital refuseniks’.

Last fall, ABI Research reported that while 70% of viewers planned to attach a DTT set-top box to their TV set, and another 10% planned to switch to cable or satellite, 20% would just let their TV sets go dark.

The European DTT lobby group DigiTAG quotes US government estimates that approximately 15% of US households depend on the terrestrial platform for their primary television viewing, equivalent to around 17 million households – so that would suggest that over three million homes will refuse to make the switch.

And that in turn has led at least one commentator to predict that “February’s switch will have a devastating impact on the ratings of local TV stations and the broadcast networks.”

Could it happen in the UK?

Probably not – at least not because of people refusing to convert to digital. Digital UK’s quarterly tracker reports show that refuseniks – defined as those who say they will not convert any of their analogue TV sets to digital – declined from 3% to 1% between 2006 and 2008, although there were regional variations. And none of the early switchover experience in Borders, the first UK region to begin the switchover process, suggests anything like the US level of resistance.

However, as the UK progresses towards 100% digital TV penetration, the audience share of the main terrestrial networks is likely to continue falling anyway, as more households are introduced to multichannel choice and opt to expand their range of viewing outside the five terrestrial networks.

The Ofcom graph below illustrates what appears to be an inexorable trend. The yellow line (‘Other’) represents the irresistible rise of the multichannel universe. Until switchover happens, that universe will continue to increase at the expense of the historical terrestrial channels.

This piece from the International Herald Tribune puts the French debate over mobile broadband’s potential cannibalisation of DTT frequencies in context.

It seems the French government is one of the few European administrations (the others being the Finnish, Swedish and Swiss authorities) to have agreed to an ITU recommendation in 2007 that its members should set aside some of their UHF frequencies for mobile broadband – this despite subsequent plans to allocate these to DTT.

The IHT article quotes a Nokia Siemens executive who points out that a wireless broadband network transmitting over UHF frequencies rather than the current 2.1GHz band used in Europe would require 75% fewer base stations to cover the same area.

The article also notes that while the European Commission is in favour of a harmonised mobile broadband frequency, the spectrum experts’ group that advises it, the Radio Spectrum Policy Group, is split. Moreover, the EU’s council of ministers has rejected a plan by Viviane Reding, the EU’s telecoms commissioner, to give the EC a role in co-ordinating spectrum at a pan-European level. (Reding is on record as advocating a co-ordinated frequency band for European mobile TV services).

This one will run and run….