The air waves are now needed for other things.

to mess with people

The government of all things, needs the existing airwaves

The quality is higher and, as an additional item, all the frequencies that were previously allocated to analong television broadcasts are being assigned to public safety communications agencies.

Digital television uses less bandwidth per channel, so it frees up frequencies that the government would like to allocate to other things. It also provides a better quality TV picture for most people (digital, unlike analog, is all or nothing--either you get the data stream perfectly or you don't get it at all--no static-filled weak signals). [edit regarding comment] Back to your petty pickiness, eh, Bob? So, okay, some of The newer generation of digital televisions will accept a less than perect signal and will use error correcting algorithms to display a pixelated image. As an example, I bought a TV about 4 years ago before I knew anything the upcoming digital conversion that claimed to be DTS compatible (though I didn't know or care what that meant at the time). I also have an old big screen TV that's not digital, and I recently bought a digital converter box for it a few weeks ago. I noticed that my old TV with the new digitial converter picks up more digital channels than the digital TV. The box tells me when a channel is weak, and those channels do come in "pixely" sometimes. My digital TV that I bought 4 years ago completely ignores those weak channels. [end edit]