Now I guess I should say thank you to Senator Conroy for his early Christmas present yesterday, giving us at Crikey what we asked for in our cheerful missive-to-the-Minister the other day. We are mildly happy he has set a date and started working towards a clear switch off date for analogue broadcasting but we are disappointed his statement is not very clear or very helpful.

What everyone wants in this most murky of areas is a clear idea of what we’re doing as we set off on the windy road up the foggy mountain that is the journey towards our digital future.

On the surface, the Minister’s press release yesterday gave a strong impression that the two new dates that have been set as milestones on this journey will make everything certain and hunky dory. But in fact it’s all still very puzzling indeed.

It didn’t help that when Crikey rang the Minister’s staff for clarification today when the line went mysteriously crackly and the staffer couldn’t hear me. As I was on a landline and the staffer on a mobile I can’t say whether it was an analogue or digital call. Either way it seemed symptomatic of the problem.

The first of the Minister’s dates is “the end of December 2013,” which presumably means 1 January 2014. This is the day that analogue signals are turned off completely across the country and the occasion when your analogue TV becomes either a museum piece or, more likely, a candidate for landfill – unless of course you have a digital set top box to make it magically digital.

According to Conroy, “setting a firm date of 2013 for the switch over from analogue to digital television transmission in Australia has given industry the certainty it needs to drive consumer uptake of digital television.”

This is a big claim because when it comes to digital technology, the only certainty is that no one has a friggin’ clue what’s going on, except for a few techo geeks who are usually incapable of explaining it because they’re, well, techo geeks.

The other date is December 2009. This is the date when digital-only broadcasting will “commence” in “metropolitan” areas. This has been moved back a year from December 2008 – a time the Minister considered was “clearly an impossible date for both viewers and industry.” Citing the current take-up rate of only 30 per cent for digital equipment, Conroy reckons the extra year will give his new taskforce time to get its ducks in a row, so to speak.

The problem is that this means bugger all. What does “commence” mean. After all the networks are already broadcasting digital signals in the cities. A more useful statement would be that “analogue transmission will cease in metropolitan areas in December 2009.”

According to Alex Encel of Loewe TV Australasia, “commence” could mean that “one small digital-only signal is broadcast in Doncaster and the networks would be complying with the Minister’s statement.” Also Encel would like to know what “metropolitan” means. Certainly Sydney and Melbourne qualify, but what about Geelong or Newcastle?

So will there be an analogue signal operating in the cities between December 2009 and 1 January 2014?

The thing that most defines this debate is mass confusion. Press Releases need to be unequivocal and unambiguous. Encel believes the Ministerial statement is “fuzzy because they don’t know what they’re doing.” Of course here at Crikey we wouldn’t be so kind as to say that. But we would like more clarity. After all the information is coming from the Minister for Communications.