Just heard on an Australian radio station stream that analog TV will be shut down on May 28th. At least in Brisbane. And you'd need a converter box. I know that ours won't work, they used PAL for analog, and I doubt that they use our 8VSB ATSC digital system.

They've adopted the DVB-T standard, which in theory could run NTSC or PAL and depending on the box transcoding from one to the other on the fly.

I doubt that anyone other than north America and central America will use ATSC.

I'm in Melbourne and have yet to hear at actual date other than soon... I did receive a letter from a government department offering me a free STB.

It's DVB-T currently with MPEG2 (though even before the analog switch off there are proposals to change to MPEG4 in 2015) 576i for SD channels, some HD channels are 720p, some are 1080i (for a while someone was on 1440x1080i).

Most STBs have the options locked out in the firmware, but some will output NTSC (useful if you have an old plasma that won't do 50Hz). I did have one older STB (probably buggy firmware) that would switch to SECAM on one channel that was broadcasting in a slightly nonstandard format for a while.

Every so often channels here will change something (usually to free up bandwidth for other channels) that will break compatibility with some STBs/TVs, then change back when people complain. I was scrapping certain STBs after they lost sound on some channels (no firmware update was available), then weeks later I plug on in at random and it's working again.