ERLIN, Oct. 29 - When Sebastian Engel received a letter in the mail last winter warning that he would soon lose his over-the-air analog television service, he reacted like any 26-year-old graduate student with little money and even less interest in the vagaries of TV technology.
Mr. Engel, who lives in a bohemian part of the former East Berlin, ignored the promotional palaver about the brave new world of digital broadcasting, and instead asked his landlord whether he could sign up for cable.
Alas, he was told, his apartment block, with its drab, coal-heated buildings, was not wired for cable. So after procrastinating for several weeks, Mr. Engel finally paid 150 euros ($174) for a set-top box that enabled his aging, portable TV to receive a digital signal. Now, he gets 25 channels and a crystal clear picture, compared with the 6 channels and snowy reception he had before the switchover.
"Sometimes the picture goes off for a couple of seconds, but otherwise it's pretty great," said Mr. Engel, as he channel-surfed through a soccer match, a hip-hop music video and the BBC news.
On Aug. 3, Berlin became the world's first major city to switch from analog to entirely digital television broadcasting. The transition went almost unnoticed in Germany or elsewhere, which is remarkable, given that in the United States, the same process has been bogged down by politics, vested interests and a stubborn fear that scrapping analog television will ignite a revolt among viewers.
The German example could prove instructive to the United States, where digital broadcasting - and the array of multimedia services likely to spring from it - still seems like a distant dream. Six years ago, Congress set the end of 2006 as the date by which most television broadcasts would be digital, but American industry executives predict the switch may not be completed before 2020.
In Germany, officials have taken a much tougher line. "We knew it would work only if we set a hard deadline," said Sascha Bakarinov, the head of the Broadcasting Authority of Berlin and Brandenburg, which oversaw the switchover. "You can take six months or two years or a decade, and people are still only going to react in the last few weeks."
Berlin's hurry-up approach was risky. Mr. Bakarinov worried about a consumer outcry over the cost of the set-top boxes, not to mention tales of aging pensioners deprived of their television. But thanks to an elaborate public relations campaign and government subsidies for people who could not afford the boxes, Berlin kept the complaints to an occasional squawk. In a city accustomed to lavish public services since German reunification, this is no small achievement.
"The German approach is extremely radical," said Ulrich Reimers, a professor at the Technical University in Braunschweig and a chief designer of the digital television standard in Germany. "This is really the one and only place in the world where this has happened."
The switch to digital is under way in other German cities, including Cologne, Hannover and Düsseldorf. By next May, Professor Reimers said, digital signals will reach 23 million of Germany's 82 million people. By 2010, he predicted, "Germany will be analog-free."
It is important to remember, in talking about digital television, that the switchover affects only viewers who receive their TV over the air. Of Germany's 34 million television households, 19 million have cable and 12 million use satellite receivers. Both industries remain predominantly analog.
That leaves 3 million German homes still using rooftop aerials or even more antiquated rabbit-ear antennas. (In the United States, an estimated 10 million of 106 million television households still rely on over-the-air signals.) In Berlin, which has 1.8 million TV households, 160,000 homes had over-the-air reception before the switchover, while 90,000 homes used over-the-air broadcast for second or third sets.
