There appears to be a lot of confusion by some surrounding the upcoming switch by the United States government from traditional analog television service to the new digital transmission (DTV) standard. This despite a long term and I thought pretty thorough ad campaign about the pending change.
In a nutshell, if you receive your television signal over the air by means of an antenna, whether that antenna is sitting on top of your television (”rabbit-ears”) or on the roof of your house/building, then you will definately be affected by the transition to digital broadcasting. But if you receive your television programming from a satellite or cable company, you should not be affected. At least there is no technical reason why you should be affected. But turns out the answer really depends on who your cable or satellite provider is. If you are a Comcast customer, for example, you may very well be affected.
Appears Comcast has made a business decision to discontinue full analog service for their customers. There is no technical reason they have to make this change, but for whatever reason, they have done so anyway. I suspect this is just a move by them to try to force customers to the higher revenue digital packages and get rid of their legacy analog transmission systems. Even the DTV.gov website shares my opinion of cable companies like Comcast!