TV viewers, get ready for a change: Congress has a switch for the low-end customers and Comcast has a switch for the rest.By June 12th, all over-the-air stations (i.e. stations you can get without cable) will have to switch their broadcast signals to digital. (There’s an exemption for a small number of “low-power stations”.) The original deadline was February 17th, but Congress delayed it because so many people weren’t ready.The reason people weren’t ready was that they couldn’t get the converters needed to view digital signals on old TV. Local retailers weren’t stocking them, much to the chagrin of media justice advocates and the Mayor and City Council, and Congress ran out of coupons for low-income customers to get them. (See this post from January.) With the new transition date now just a few weeks away (and a nationwide announcement scheduled for this week), I checked in with Jonathan Lawson of the local group Reclaim the Media. Perhaps not surprisingly, it doesn’t look like the joint Mayor/City Council letter did much to persuade local vendors.”Last month we got a commitment from Fred Meyer that they would sell a 40 dollar box at some point,” he says. “They wouldn’t stock it all the time, but they would do a sale. But they haven’t followed through on that commitment yet.”He suggests instead buying the boxes online; a list of available vendors can be found at SeattleDTV.com. Lawson also recommends freedtvshop.com, which will walk you through the coupon process over the phone or the Internet. Reclaim the Media will also be creating local assistance centers to help people with the transition, including at Youngstown Cultural Arts Center and various public parks.One group that looks like it might get really screwed by the transition is rural consumers. Lawson notes that many of the translator signals that send the regular broadcast signals to the hinterlands aren’t making the transition. Thus, rural-dwellers who think they’re ready may find themselves without TV. “Once the transition happens, we’ll hear a lot more about this problem,” he says. Meanwhile, over the next six months, Comcast will be switching all cable channels above 29 to digital and encrypted, with the latter meaning that even if you have a new, digital-ready TV, you’ll need a special Comcast box to get them. Brier Dudley’s got the details in this FAQ.