Digital TV Facts: The Latest

After tomorrow, subscribers to plain-old cable service may finally be assured of continued access to local stations. Cable carriage of local channels after completion of the digital TV transition will be addressed at the FCC’s public meeting on Tuesday, and commissioners might just approve a proposal from Chairman Kevin Martin to require cable operators to set aside enough channel slots to provide stations in both digital and analog form. If such a measure moves forward, customers without digital cable service would still be able to watch local stations on conventional television sets without needing to add a digital cable box.

After the shutdown of analog TV broadcasts on February 17, 2009, cable customers are likely to continue receiving most or all of the local stations they receive today, one way or another. The details remain uncertain, however, despite a reported $200 million advertising campaign launched by the cable TV industry last week intended to assure cable subscribers that everything will be fine.

I would not like to see cable customers saddled with digital cable set-top boxes that they would not otherwise need—a senseless waste of energy that would probably also stick consumers with additional monthly fees.

But a solution imposed by the FCC may also harm consumers. Devoting scarce bandwidth to duplicate versions of stations whose carriage is federally mandated could put the squeeze on cable capacity, especially for smaller systems. More space for channel 23 could mean less space is available for C-SPAN and other cable networks (especially those in HD) or cable-provided broadband internet access.

An intriguing proposal from the major cable lobby, uncovered by Ted Hearn of Multichannel News, would provide dual carriage of “must-carry” stations for three years after the digital broadcasting switchover. (Today, Hearn does the math and attempts to determine just how many stations elect must-carry privileges.) The cable industry plan, like Martin’s, has not been released to the public, but I suspect the FCC will resist its reported exemptions for “bandwidth-constrained operators.”

A sunset provision would be well-advised, however. The FCC has an obligation to minimize the pain of the digital transition for the viewing public, but afterward I would prefer to see regulators take a fresh look at the assumptions behind must-carry rules and whether they truly serve the public interest. In the near term, an aggressive push by the FCC to extend must-carry may backfire if the cable industry follows through on threats to take the commission to court. Given the changing media landscape, the justification for must-carry may no longer be strong enough to survive a court challenge.