[i.h]

It's to do with the UNIX epoch (which began on the 1st of Jan 1970), is recorded as the number of seconds since that date, and the date in 2038 is when it fills up a 32 bit integer and would overflow

Hopefully not quite the same panic as Y2K as many affected systems have already been upgraded to use a 64 bit integer

In a TV context there have been similar issues with some conditional access systems, eg one of the systems used for US cable TV uses a different date reference and a smaller integer and this is about to roll over. I gather the vendors have found fixes and workarounds however.

www.lightreading.com