Starting tomorrow, every new TV set will have to be able to decode over-the-air digital signals (in preparation for the 2009 switchover).

Starting Thursday, all new television sets designed to receive over-the-air signals must contain a tuner capable of receiving digital broadcasts, not just the old-style analog signals that we have relied on for the past half-century.

The March 1 mandate covers smaller sets, the last bastion of all-analog technology. Besides, most Americans have cable or satellite television service. Those video providers handle the digital signal through the adapter boxes they provide to customers.

This has nothing to do with HDTV which is a completely separate set of technologies. So hold onto your old analog sets, so you can tell your grandchildren what it was like in the ‘olden days.’

‘Former FT reporter” Tom Foremski has an interesting musing on the shift of media power from East coast to West:

Silicon Valley is rapidly turning into Media Valley--and New York, NY should look out--the capital of the media world is shifting about 3,000 miles westwards.

Some of Silicon Valley’s largest companies are media companies: Google, Yahoo, EBay, for example are media companies--they publish pages of content and advertising around it.

Some of the most interesting and most valuable new Silicon Valley companies, such as Youtube, Facebook are based here in Northern California. So is Craigslist, the seventh largest online media company in the English language world (in terms of traffic).

Take a look at Business 2.0’s 25 startups to watch and look at how many of these mostly “social” media and advertising companies and are based in the Bay Area:18. Only two are based in New York.

But if you work in Manhattan you feel at the center of the media universe. Midtown and the Avenue of the Americas is where the capital of the media industry has sat for many decades.

We find it particularly prescient that Tom classifies several “technology” companies as media companies as soon as you realize their money is made from eyeballs. The media deals would indeed look very different if Google & Ebay were considered media firms. But ‘Old’ media isn’t so blind either, this is why they refer to Google as a “Frenemy.”

Defying conventional logic, YouTube’s traffic has only surged since the Viacom snafu (according to Hitwise data):

It’s still early in the game, to be sure, but so far it looks like YouTube can keep calling Viacom’s bluff, especially since early research shows that YouTube traffic has surged, not suffered, since Viacom demanded the takedown of 100,000 purportedly purloined video clips.

One of the big question marks left about the transition from analog entertainment mediums to the Internet is that most Hollywood guilds have deals based on TV, DVD and other established media. There is a large dark cloud looming on the horizon when it comes to how actors, writers, editors, and a host of other crew will be compensated for internet-only content.

The problems of who gets paid and when will only heat up as Internet, TV, and mobile phone content merge. Eric Kmetz, freelance writer and director, believes the Internet will develop its own standards in the next six months as problems escalate. Many in the industry are trying to cover themselves because they don’t know what direction the digital content will take, Mr. Kmetz said.

And if that’s not enough, Hollywood execs are also thinking about what happens when the webisodes become easy to pirate, a scenario reminiscent of the early days when recording labels first sold music on the web, said Phillip Swann, president of TV Predictions.com, of Dunkirk, Maryland.

Not so fast said the Joost-ers, apparently we forgot to take into account how Joost could boost its content by playing off of the widespread hatred of YouTube. Especially after Google has taken such a snobby attitude towards the entertainment industry:

The agreement comes two weeks after Viacom demanded that YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google Inc., remove 100,000 clips that were posted without permission. Viacom will provide shows from MTV and BET Networks and feature films from Paramount to Joost, which is run by the same duo who started the Skype Internet calling service and the Kazaa music-sharing site.

``The Joost platform is in essence a closed system,’’ said Allen Weiner, an analyst at Gartner Inc., a market research firm in Stamford, Connecticut. ``The ability for piracy and content to be stolen is minimal.’’

Joost, based in New York, with offices in London and Leiden, the Netherlands, offers a ``piracy-proof’’ platform, the companies said. Content creators and viewers must both download free software, which limits sharing. YouTube, the fifth most- visited Web site, according to indexer Alexa.com, requires no software and places few restrictions on sharing.