Wired is featuring a story on Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a nonprofit organization “with a mission to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture.“ One of the PCF’s main projects is Miro, a free and Open Source video player for digital files. The Wired article notes, “Ultimately, the foundation’s goal is to promote and build an entirely new, open mass medium of online television.“ The nonprofit group has 12 full-time employees and is supported by grants from a variety of supporters, including Skyline Public Works and the Mitch Kapor, Surdna, Mozilla and Knight foundations.

Cnet News.com has published a set of FAQs (frequently asked questions) about the U.S. transition to digital television, which is mandated to take place on February 17, 2009.

Polls show that three-fifths of Americans don’t know anything about this transition, which will be the biggest change to television in the United States since the introduction of TV itself. Congress and executive branch officials are concerned that a large portion of Americans will not take the steps necessary to prepare for the end of analog, over-the-air broadcast of television. So there will be a massive public education campaign in the United States over the next year. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration held a public education kick-off event in Washington, D.C. on September 25.

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the industry group for cable TV, launched a $200 million ad campaign to tell consumers that if they have cable TV, they will have no problems when the U.S. switches to digital TV in February 2009. The new TV ads can be seen here.

UPDATE: Consumers Union has a different take on these ads, pointing out that cable customers will probably have to upgrade to more expensive digital service and buy or rent a converter box for their television.

Three out of five Americans don’t know that the U.S. is scheduled to turn off the long-familiar, over-the-air analog TV system on February 18, 2009, according to polls. While only about 19% of Americans still get their TV using an antenna, the transition to digital TV is confusing or even unknown among most Americans. We can expect a big public education campaign in 2008; IBM was awarded a contract of $120 million to help educate Americans about the DTV transition. The federal government features a Web site about the change, and there is a comprehensive Web site available from the DTV Transition Coalition, a large, diverse industry and nonprofit coalition.