04/08/03

Berlin became the first city in the world to switch off its analogue broadcast signal and transfer completely to digital TV.

The transition was pretty smooth, said Sascha Bakarinow, project leader for the switch to digital at the Media Institution Berlin-Brandenburg (MABB). "We've only had about 500 phone calls to our hotline, most of them asking standard questions about how to operate the set-top box," Bakarinow said. "A few others were welfare recipients who wanted to know if they could get a set-top box paid for by the government." The analogue switch-off was helped by the fact that, of Berlin's 1.8 million households, 1.5 million are already cable subscribers, and about 150,000 households have satellite dishes, officials said.

For more information, consult the MABB WWW site - http://www.mabb.de