From the numbers coming out of Wilmington, N.C., this week, I'm figuring that about 5 percent of the homes that rely on off-air reception for some or all of their TV were either unaware or unprepared for the market's early DTV switch.

Here's how I get to that percentage. The market has 180,000 total TV homes, but, according to the NAB, only about 15,000 rely solely on off-air reception. And I'm going to guess (because apparently no one knows and to keep the match simple) that another 15,000 have at least one set in the house not hooked up to satellite or cable.

So, that's 30,000 homes that had something to lose when FCC Chairman Kevin Martin turned the lights out on analog with a big fakey switch at City Hall at noon on Monday.

Now, as best that I can determine, the FCC and the TV stations and others in Wilmington have so far received between 1,800 and 2,000 calls from people who, for whatever reason, were having real trouble figuring out what happened or how to get their converters or digital TVs to work right.

A few hundred of these viewers were not really complaining about digital. They were upset because they could no longer get Raycom Media's WECT. That was intentional. The NBC affiliate had put its digital antenna on a different tower so that it could provide better in-market service. Since these complainants are out-of-market viewers, I am going to disregard them.

That leaves me with 1,500 bona fide complaints and 1,500 of 30,000 is 5 percent.

Five percent. That's not so bad.

Or is it?

The FCC, the NAB and the local broadcasters poured a tremendous amount of money and countless man-hours into making sure everybody in the market was ready for the big event.

Martin was down there so much you would have thought he was running for public office.

I wasn't there in the weeks leading up to Monday's switchover, but the broadcasters assure me that the effort was extraordinary. If fact, some said that they were beating the DTV drum so loudly that some of their viewers had begun complaining and demanding that they knock it off.

Yet, despite it all, 5 percent of the homes still were caught short.

I am now going to assume that the good people of Wilmington are the same as Americans everywhere — just as technically savvy, just as tuned in to what's going on in the world and just as prone to put things off to the last minute.

If that is the case, then we should expect that at least 1.7 million homes will be at a loss on the morning of Feb. 18, 2009, the morning after every full-power TV station as a matter of law must turn off its analog transmitter.

According to the NAB, 34.2 million of the 113 million homes in the nation still get TV via antennas on at least one set. Five percent of 34.2 million is 1.7 million.

But that, I think, is the best-case scenario.

No other market will get the same kind of attention that Wilmington has received. Neither the FCC nor the NAB has the resources to mount anywhere near the same kind of campaign in the other 209 TV markets as they did in Wilmington.

So, I'm thinking that the actual percentage of homes left behind will be around 10 percent and the actual number will be 3.4 million.

That's an awful lot of homes. There are many executive producers who would love to attract that many households to their programs.

From all accounts, the FCC and the local broadcasters in Wilmington are working hard to take care of the callers. Dan Ullmer, the chief engineer at WECT, told me in an interview that the stations hired people to follow up with the 150 people who complained directly to the station.

Connie Knox, the GM at Capitol Broadcasting's WILM, the CBS low-power affiliate, says that "one of the coolest things that has been happening" is local firefighters have been hooking up converter boxes and antennas for those who can't do it themselves. "In a way, television is part of the public safety venue and that's what they're all about," she says.

That is cool, but there is no way the FCC and local broadcasters are going to be able to cope with the problems of 3.4 million homes — more than eight million people — no matter how hard they try. Firefighters pitching in isn't likely to happen in markets much larger than Wilmington.

So, the first lesson of Wilmington is that the FCC and local broadcasters have to prepare for the flood of calls they will receive on Feb. 18. In larger markets, this may mean setting up phone banks of | More …