TV broadcasters are trained from a tender age to create in their program scheduling a seamless, pleasant flow that carries fickle viewers from show to show and through the promos and commercials. They avoid anything that would unnecessarily irk viewers and cause them to switch channels in search of sometime better. This is Lesson No. 1 in TV 101.

So, what I'm about to suggest may be hard for station managers inculcated in these traditional ways to accept. But here goes.

For the sake a smoother DTV transition next February, TV stations must start annoying their over-the-air viewers so they take action and do whatever they must to get ready for the loss of analog service.

The big lesson from the Wilmington, N.C., early cut-off test last month is that as many as 10 percent of the ovr-the air (OTA) viewers across the nation may not be ready for digital when it comes on Feb. 17. That translates to millions of people.

The way things are going, on the morning of Feb. 18, those millions will be calling stations, the FCC, public officials, the local police and fire departments and anybody else they think might help them recover their TV signals.

Some will be having trouble with their converters, others with their antennas. And some will be totally clueless.

So, to have any chance of avoiding this worst-case scenario, TV stations are simply going to have to get more aggressive it getting the word out on DTV and motivating viewers to act.

Here's today's takeaway: Isolate and inundate.

First, figure out how to isolate your analog OTA viewers so that you can target your messaging at them. You don't want to annoy viewers who watch your station over satellite and cable or who are already tuned to your digital signal.

For many stations, this is easy. They have dedicated feeds for the multichannel outlets.

But other stations still rely on their broadcast signals to reach cable headends. They will have to contact the systems and make sure as many as possible are picking up the digital signal rather than the old analog one.

Once you're confidant that only (or mostly) OTA viewers are watching your analog signal, it's time to inundate them with PSAs, programs, crawls, whatever you can think of, to remind them again and again of the transition.

This idea of pounding analog viewers mercilessly with DTV reminders is not mine. It comes from Dan Ullmer, who lived through the Wilmington test as chief engineer for Raycom's NBC-Fox duopoly, WECT-WSFX. He knows, as few others do, what broadcasters will face in February if they don't step up the intensity of their DTV education.

Earlier this week, Dan and I made presentations at the Iowa DTV Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, on the Wilmington test and its fallout and implications.

In his talk, Dan suggested that stations run frequent soft tests in which regular programming is replaced with an informational slate or video. To work, Dan said, they must be run for long periods in highly rated programs when people are actually watching.

Dan is making sense. Broadcasters are inclined, I think, to slip in the tests during times of low viewership. But what sense does that make? The idea here is to reach as many people as you can as often as you can. Conducting test when few are watching is pointless.

Prior to the Wilmington cut off, Dan said, WECT ran two soft tests, one for one minute, the other for five. It wasn't enough. "They were ineffective; they didn't get the message through."

The soft test generated just two or three calls, providing no hint of the hundreds of calls the station got and is still getting in the wake of the cut-off.

In a conversation with me, Dan said that he believes that stations should go even further.

In the final weeks leading up to the February cut-off, they should run a continuous crawl across the bottom of the screen on the analog signal, he said, noting that most stations likely have an old analog character generator gathering dusk and waiting for one last assignment.

To make the crawl really effective and make sure no one station suffers for annoying viewers, I think stations in each market should cooperate and all commit to running a continuous crawl during the final days.

If that's done, viewers' only escape would be a digital signal. They would have a powerful incentive to go out and get a converter box and new antenna and figure out how they work.

Let's see: 130 days left to the analog cut off.

Broadcasters can no longer be pussyfooting around.

Frequent and long soft tests and the continuous crawls are good tools for alerting analog viewers and broadcasters ought to put them to use. "You have to use every trick in the book," Dan said.

I agree.

Sure, such tricks are annoying and they will cause a backlash from viewers who don't want their programs disrupted or intruded upon. You'll get angry calls. But isn't that kind of what you want? A reaction of some kind?

And isn't it better to annoy viewers prior to the cut off than to leave them in the dark afterward?

The answer is yes.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsday. You may contact him at hajessell@tvnewsday.com.