Maybe their plans have changed since then. De Wilde's statement is from January 11.

Most likely. Don't forget her comment to the CRTC was in response to "the six month advance notice period prescribed by subsection 3(1) of the Digital Regulations." If the CRTC remained firm on this, they would not be allowed to transition in May.

We are 6 months from August, so the date in March that they start broadcasting their PSA's is the earliest date in August that they will be permitted to transition. This is all assuming a flash cut of course.

According to that timetable, every station that is converting should be running PSAs now. Has anyone seen any?

Nope...

Today's TVO response on their Facebook page:
TVO Yes, that was our plan at the time. Since then we’ve learned more about equipment deliveries and availability of resources. We have also more fully developed how we will communicate the transition to viewers. We can do so more effectively by simplifying the message – 2 dates, rather than 9 dates.

According to that timetable, every station that is converting should be running PSAs now. Has anyone seen any?

The March 1 deadline for beginning PSAs was just a proposal by the CRTC, and I haven't seen a final decision from them yet. Obviously it will be something different when it's finally announced, seeing as March 1 has already come and gone.

Actually, we have Télé-Québec that run a PSA since March 1, and they put a special section on their website, where you can watch the PSA (in french):

http://transitionnumerique.telequebec.tv/

Nothing on TVO website.

Today,

The Commission approves the application by The Ontario Educational Communications Authority to amend the broadcasting licence for the television programming undertaking CICA-TV Toronto to add a post-transition digital rebroadcasting transmitter to serve the population of London.

http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2011/2011-158.htm

Erika Kramer of TVO just anounced in the SMPTE meeting tonight the following hard cut dates (will be done overnight):

Aug. 16 - London/Ottawa
Aug. 18 - Toronto/Windsor

Sorry, I didn't get the others.

I believe they were all listed as either the 16th or 18th.

Only Toronto and Ottawa will have direct HD feeds, while Windsor will get a terrestrial feed from Toronto to rebroadcast. All other digital installs will be SD for now, as they are limited by the satellite downlinks at the sites.

wow. that is terrible.

August 16: Kitchener, London, Ottawa, Thunder Bay
August 18: Chatham, Cloyne, Toronto, Windsor

Belleville's date was not mentioned, I think.

Their transition website will be at http://tvo.org/digitalovertheair but it doesn't seem to be up yet.

My interpretation was that the OTA HD signal would be picked up and relayed through the transmitters between Toronto and Windsor (Kitchener, London, Chatham) sort of like in the good old days. She said they would look into upgrading their satellite to HD in the future. Their current satellite feed is 4 mb/s MPEG-2. Maybe they can find a way to at least make it widescreen.

wow. that is terrible.
It's better than nothing at all, IMHO.

My interpretation was that the OTA HD signal would be picked up and relayed through the transmitters between Toronto and Windsor (Kitchener, London, Chatham) sort of like in the good old days. She said they would look into upgrading their satellite to HD in the future. Their current satellite feed is 4 mb/s MPEG-2.

That's what I understood too -- an HD signal will chain from Toronto to Kitchener to London to Chatham to Windsor, with the 4 Mb/s satellite link being a backup in case any of the links are broken.

I'm assuming Thunder Bay, Cloyne and Belleville will be SD for now.

It's better than nothing at all, IMHO.
Better than nothing? Isn't it publicly funded?

I was just thinking TVO could easily have turned off Belleville and Cloyne instead of converting to DTV. Neither is in a mandatory market. They were just outside the new UHF TV spectrum.

But they are in 52 to 69 so they had to do something with them. Glad to see TVO is not leaving anyone in the dark like another "public" broadcaster is ....

One more interesting thing from last night -- the Belleville and Chatham transmitters will need new antennas, and TVO will be using antennas with elliptical polarization so they can do mobile ATSC in the future. As far as I recall, all their other transmitters will be using existing antennas.

Would you rather it just go off-air all together? I think the consensus is that something is much better than nothing. Would them have a 16:9 19mbps stream for every transmitter be ideal for all viewers? Of course. But at the end of the day they could have just gone dark in non-mandatory markets like the private companies want to do.