Digital TV Facts: The Latest

TV Sales: Samsung remains the top-seller in LCD TVs, with Sony overtaking Philips for second place….Best Buy earnings, pressured by “significant product transitions in the flat-panel TV business,” fall 18 percent.

The Day Analog TV Died, as imagined by Medialoper: “I was damn sure we’d had another one of them 9-11-style attacks and that this time the terrorists killed our TVs.”

Microsoft rebrands its IPTV platform: The new name, Microsoft Mediaroom, is passable. But the logo that may, one day, dominate your remote control? Sheer genius.

These posts are now available by email. So why miss a single moment of the digital TV transition?

• Digital TV Facts free email subscriptions

• Handheld DTV from Best Buy draws mixed reviews

• Democrats to FCC: Inform consumers on DTV

• Digital TV broadcast in Navajo is a first

• Micronas DTV device drivers go open-source

• Converter box, other STB shipments to grow

• SED TVs postponed indefinitely

• Coalition touts broadband plan for analog TV spectrum

USDTV, a low-cost subscription TV service delivered over the broadcast airwaves, has survived bankruptcy. New owner NexGen Telecom reportedly paid $1 million for the company’s assets—a mere pittance, really, when you consider the billions spent by AT&T and Verizon to roll out their U-Verse and FiOS video services.

The viability of USDTV’s business model—providing just a few cable channels plus local broadcasts for $19.95 a month—remains an open question.

Earlier:
• Investor may rescue USDTV
• USDTV woes: Bad sign for digital broadcasting?
• A multicast mirage (or, why America is not Britain)

• Link: Multichannel News

An international treaty on retransmission of television signals might keep pirated copies of Desperate Housewives off Bulgarian internet sites. But read the fine print:

The treaty’s broad language would create an expansive new copyright on TV signals that could lead to higher prices and more restrictions on home recording. Watching shows on a digital video recorder, transmitting a football game to a laptop via services such as SlingBox or simply moving video from one device to another in a home network would technically be considered a retransmission that requires the broadcaster’s OK.

Critics say it’s another desperate attempt by the broadcast industry to use legislation to restrict technological innovation and keep a dying business model on life support.

• Link: LA Times

Digital TV could give us five or six times as many local channels as before. But without a federal mandate for cable carriage of the new multicast channels, station owners may be in no hurry to add them.

Even as broadcast technology marches ahead, the notion that broadcasters should actually broadcast is seeming rather quaint. Some station owners, more jazzed about delivering programming via the internet, have put multicasting on the back burner:

…the Big Four networks and stations for the most part are holding their best content for Web distribution, with some executives saying they believe they can reach more viewers nationwide on the Internet than they can through the TV, since most cable operators only carry a station’s primary signal.

“If people are going to put time and energy into creating a channel, at the moment, why not create it for the Internet instead of waiting for multicast?” said a senior executive at a Big Four network who asked not to be identified.

Still, several networks and stations are testing the multicast waters, Multichannel News reports, and some have negotiated agreements for cable carriage.

• Link: Multichannel News

Americans’ access to internet content and subscription TV services are two key issues at stake today as the Senate Commerce Committee prepares to vote on a major revamp of the nation’s telecom laws. Senators have proposed more than 200 amendments, and the telecom, cable, media and technology industries will be watching closely.

Network neutrality advocates, including Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), remain unhappy with the latest version of the bill from Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

“The new draft’s provisions on net neutrality utterly fail to protect consumers and preserve an open Internet,” Inouye said in a statement.

“Under the current language, network operators will have the ability to dictate what the Internet of the future will look like, what content it will include and how it will operate.”

Streamlined video franchise procedures could speed the arrival of new television services provided by telephone companies in more American homes. The danger is that existing consumer protections will be stripped away and promises of increased competition will not benefit all Americans:

On video franchising, Inouye and Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., have sought to require Bell operators to provide pay-television service to all neighborhoods, regardless of income.

Along the same lines, Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., plan to file an amendment to require that new providers build out their high-speed networks throughout entire franchise areas. “Kerry and Boxer feel that the Senate should not legalize cherry-picking of cable service,” a Kerry aide said.

How much can a 159-page bill, thick with regulatory arcana, really matter? Well, just look at how much is being spent by some of the industries attempting to influence the political process:

Verizon Communications, SBC Communications Inc., AOL Time Warner, General Electric Co./NBC, News Corp./Fox, Viacom Inc./CBS, Comcast Corp., Walt Disney Co./ABC, and the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and the United States Telecom Association together gave nearly $45 million in federal political donations since 1997. Of that total, $17.8 million went to Democrats and $26.9 million went to Republicans.

These eight companies and three trade associations also spent more than $358 million on lobbying in Washington, since 1998, when lobbying expenditures were first required to be disclosed.

Much more than just money is on the line, according to the nonpartisan government watchdog Common Cause:

What is at stake is not just how much consumers pay for access to the Internet or their cable TV, but rather the fabric of American civic discourse—how ideas get communicated or are stifled, whether citizens will have a way to get the information they need to govern themselves.

Stevens believes he has the votes to pass the bill, according to Reuters.

• Links: internetnews.com, National Journal, Report on fallout from 1996 Telecom Act from Common Cause [pdf], Reuters

Two planned broadband TV services have each devised unusual strategies to acquire programming, which involve the purchase of two small cable TV systems. Titan Global Entertainment plans to launch a nationwide IPTV service, and eWAN 1 Inc. plans to stream live TV to its own handheld player. The path ahead is not without obstacles, according to Multichannel News:

These would-be Internet TV operators may face a buzzsaw of legal issues in moving content out-of-market, beyond existing geographic boundaries.

Existing contracts held by the cable acquisitions could open the door to negotiations for IPTV retransmission or, apparently, give the new owners alternate-platform rights contained therein. The latter scenario is called into question, though, by comments from a Turner Broadcasting spokesperson and a media lawyer, both quoted in Karen Brown’s article.

Turner is part of Time Warner, a corporate umbrella that contains several of the most popular cable networks as well as the nation’s second largest cable operator. Big players in the subscription-TV ecosystem may naturally be expected to marshal their forces against audience erosion from upstart internet-TV services. While AT&T and Verizon have the mass and the means to get programming deals, much smaller competitors like eWAN and Titan will need to be both resourceful and creative. If HBO and CNN are off limits, perhaps rather than trying to duplicate cable and satellite TV offerings they can instead focus on deals with independent producers.

Without net neutrality protections, though, small TV-over-IP ventures may be stopped in their tracks. Should the corporations that control the pipes—already having the advantages of size and vertical integration—be free to shunt everyone else’s video traffic off to the internet’s slow lane? This is why we need real, non-discriminatory net neutrality measures that go beyond what is in the latest draft of Sen. Stevens’ telecom bill.

• Link: Multichannel News

Public TV stations’ multicast channels will be carried on Verizon’s FiOS television service, under a deal announced today.

Under the multiyear agreement, every Verizon FiOS TV system will carry the full digital signal of up to three public television stations within the system’s service area, as well as any additional noncommercial station that does not duplicate programming of another station in the market. The agreement also includes PBS and local public television stations’ HDTV programming and local stations’ digital multicasts.

The 400-channel FiOS TV system is currently available in parts of seven states.

Public TV multicasts are available on many cable systems, too, as part of an earlier carriage agreement with cable operators. An FCC vote on June 21 could require cable systems to carry local multicast channels from commercial and noncommercial stations.

Public television is using its additional broadcast channels, made possible by the switch to digital TV, to good advantage. Its multicast services include PBS Kids Go!, Viva TV, World and Create.

While public broadcasters continue to serve the public in innovative ways, the Bush administration has proposed a 37 percent cut in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This week, the House Appropriations Committee voted to slash $95 million in funding.

• Links: press release, LA Times

AT&T supports rules that would give cable channel slots to local digital TV multicast services, according to a senior executive:

“We’re more than happy to put this programming on our network,” Robert Quinn, senior vice president for federal regulatory affairs at AT&T, said in a telephone interview. “We support multicast must-carry.”

Quinn’s remarks in a Reuters interview on Tuesday would appear to contradict an FCC filing from the company last week, reported in Multichannel News:

“It is AT&T’s belief that decisions affecting carriage of programming offered by local commercial broadcast stations should be subject to commercial discussions between content owners and video providers,” the company said in a June 9 Federal Communications Commission filing…

AT&T maintains that rules governing cable TV do not apply to its new IPTV video service. Both stories say AT&T is negotiating with broadcasters to carry multicasts.

• Links: Reuters, Multichannel News

AT&T does not want to be forced to grant channel slots on its new TV service to local commercial broadcasters’ multicast offerings, according to an FCC filing. The telephone company’s stance puts it in the same corner with the cable industry—although AT&T maintains its U-verse IPTV system is not a cable service under federal law.

Negotiations between video providers and station owners should determine whether digital TV multicasts get carriage, AT&T argues. Perfectly reasonable. But what about the company’s grumble about multicast channels that disappear for part of the broadcast day, squeezed out by HDTV programming:

Designing the network to accommodate shifting digital-TV signal formats would cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars” per programming stream, AT&T said, adding that the FCC needed to take those costs into account as the agency “considers ways to increase video choice for consumers.”

Is that hyperbole? Or has AT&T invested billions in an IPTV system that’s amazingly inflexible ?

[UPDATE (6/14/2006): An AT&T senior executive now says the company supports multicast must-carry.]

Earlier:
FCC to move on cable slots for multicasts, report says

• Link: Multichannel News

We have a fresh example of why local TV doesn’t always have to mean broadcasting, courtesy of public TV’s Robert X. Cringely. In the new world of IPTV, he maintains, local connections—between humans, as well as between wires—can make a world of difference:

The Internet television story, even as written here in columns going back as far as the late 1990s, pushed the idea of enabling the aggregation of widely-dispersed viewing audiences, allowing programming to thrive that might not be successful on any local station, much less on the national network. A good example is NerdTV, which wouldn’t attract enough viewers on most PBS stations to even generate a rating, yet when offered as an Internet download, drawing from a global population, makes some pretty good numbers. But there is no concept called “local” in this aggregation model, so stations tend to feel threatened by it; if the network can reach local viewers directly, what need is there for a local station?

But it doesn’t have to be that way, because the supposed strengths of centralization aren’t really strengths at all when viewed in terms of the much more imposing issue of bandwidth costs, where all the advantages are local.

PBS station managers could slash their bandwidth costs, Cringely suggests, by installing video servers right at their local broadband providers’ data centers. That’s because cable and phone companies can handle traffic more cheaply while it remains on their own network.

He also has schemes for revenue sharing, content trading, and—brace yourself—a nonprofit video-streaming service bureau to be administered by PBS. His theory raises more than a few questions (once you put “local” content on the world wide web, the whole world has a way of finding it), but it will take more than a little wild-eyed creativity to secure a future for local television. You can see why Cringely files these columns under the word Pulpit.

Earlier:
• TV localism retains its defenders, if not its logic
• Would TV networks use VOD…and bypass affiliates?
• Will TV’s new rules serve big players or public?

• Link: I, Cringely