Digital TV Facts: The Latest

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s plan to give cable subscribers additional channels from local broadcasters fell off the commission’s agenda this week. But it may pop up again at the FCC’s December 18 public meeting, according to an AP report.

Martin promoted the idea that minority- and women-owned businesses (among others) would be able to lease DTV multicast channels from station owners. But a dozen Congressional Democrats, in a letter to the chairman, expressed skepticism:

“You have presented no evidence to support your assertion that multicast must-carry would promote program diversity and increase programming choices.”

Republican Martin would likely need support from his Democratic colleagues to enact multicast must-carry. But Democrat Michael Copps, who acknowledges ownership diversity as an urgent issue, suggested this week that the chairman was trying to ram the measure through.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s latest plan to force cable carriage of broadcasters’ multicast channels appears to be advancing. At its November 27 public meeting, the commission will address “initiatives designed to increase participation in the broadcasting industry by new entrants and small businesses, including minority- and women-owned businesses.”

Under a plan circulated by Martin, station owners would lease out some of their excess digital TV channel capacity to new participants, and cable companies would be required to add the channels to their systems. (With the move to DTV, each local station is capable of broadcasting separate programming over five or six channels simultaneously.)
Read the rest of this entry »

Cable TV customers who have not upgraded to digital service would nonetheless enjoy continued access to local stations, under a plan circulated by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Without federal action, local channels could disappear from the television screens of some analog cable subscribers following the switchoff of analog TV broadcasts on February 17, 2009. While cable companies have proposed their own remedies to this pressing problem, the issue has long remained on the back burner for regulators.

If Martin’s plan is approved by the commission, cable systems will carry required local stations in both digital and analog form starting in early 2009, Ted Hearn of Multichannel News reports. Subscribers to traditional analog cable service would be able to receive local channels as they do today. Unless regulators act, some cable customers who own conventional analog television sets will need to get digital cable boxes for local-channel access.
Read the rest of this entry »

A cable company scheme to make hay from the digital TV transition has entered a new phase. An Ohio cable operator, as you may recall, floated a plan to offer local channels for free via cable TV in lieu of government-discounted DTV converter boxes. Two other small cable companies are now on board, TWICE reports, and a web site has been launched under the banner of the “Save Our Sets Coalition” (SOS).

As I’ve said before, this is an innovative plan. But the air of disingenuousness about it is just getting thicker. Read the rest of this entry »

Your local station should now know which channel to call home after the transition to digital TV is completed. The FCC announced final DTV channel assignments for more than 1,800 stations yesterday.

After analog TV broadcasts terminate on February 17, 2009, many stations will assume new channel numbers. No worries, though (well, almost; I’ll explain later). Surprisingly, viewers won’t generally need to learn new channel lineups, because stations will retain their customary on-air identities. Channel 11 will still promote itself as channel 11, for instance, even if it has moved to channel 32.

The familiar channel numbers from the analog era can be preserved to a large extent, thanks to “channel virtualization.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Shocking news today for suburban Detroit readers: HDTV broadcasts can be received with an antenna! For free!

Cable TV companies have allegedly conspired to hide this fact, along with the existence of free DTV multicast channels—but The Oakland Press is now setting the record straight.

The newspaper headline is Onionesque: “High-definition TV available over the air, attorney says.”

Nonetheless, it’s true. Sadly, to many readers, it is no doubt news.

Here’s another fact The Press should stress: If you want to watch high-definition shows in actual HD, you will need an HDTV.

• Link: The Oakland Press

Multichannel News covers The Independent Show, a conference of smaller cable operators:

• Public TV’s additional “multicast” channels, available in many communities, should appear in more cable households, under a tentative deal between the American Cable Association (ACA) and public TV stations.

• Changes to distant-channel rules, under the proposed Television Freedom Act of 2007, win the ACA’s support. The bill would allow cable and satellite TV companies to carry local TV stations from adjacent markets.

• “Downloadable security” (presumed successor to the CableCARD) has a deployment schedule that overlaps with the February 17, 2009, shutdown of analog TV broadcasts.

The shutdown of analog television broadcasts in 2009 offers “high potential for a train wreck,” according to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). Is the digital TV transition a disaster in the making?

It’s still too early to tell. Alarm bells were rung at today’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing, where an AARP official raised the prospect of senior citizens losing their television service and taking it out on Congress. That’s exactly what would happen, too, if we switched over tomorrow. Surveys continue to show low levels of awareness about what will happen on February 17, 2009, when over-the-air broadcasters will complete the change to digital TV. Personally, I’m not despairing—not yet.
Read the rest of this entry »

News roundup time, video rangers:

• Spectrum wars: The broadcasting lobby isn’t so powerful after all, Drew Clark maintains. Oh, and forget about “white spaces.” What would it take to make them vacate the airwaves?

• DTV communications job: Powerful or not, the National Association of Broadcasters seeks a communications coordinator for the digital television transition.

• Must-carry-go-round: At Multichannel News, Todd Spangler on dual must-carry and Tom Steinert-Threlkeld on multicast must-carry.

• EU pushes mobile DTV: The European Commission adopts a mobile TV strategy encouraging the use of DVB-H as a single European standard.

• Goin’ all-digital in Kentucky: WLJC-TV of Beattybille, Ky., will cease broadcasting on analog channel 65 and operate WLJC-DT as a single channel, digital-only station on DTV channel 7 [pdf].

As momentum builds for the digital TV transition, Motorola has been notably absent from the DTV converter box party. Consumer electronics firms that have announced digital-to-analog converter boxes include LG, Thomson/RCA, Samsung and Jasco/GE. The devices, sometimes called digital TV adapters, will allow conventional television sets to continue taking in over-the-air broadcasts after the analog TV shutdown on February 17, 2009.

Motorola announced today that it will combine its TV set-top box business with its network equipment business, according to Reuters. The company, along with Scientific Atlanta, is a leading maker of cable boxes. Motorola demonstrated a prototype cable box with built-in digital broadcast tuner at the 2007 Cable Show in May.

But what about DTV converter boxes for antenna-only viewers?
Read the rest of this entry »

ABC plans to transform its low-profile broadband news channel into a full-blown cable network, according to TVNewsday. In its latest vision for ABC News Now, the network would partner with affiliates to offer local segments every half-hour. Station owners might love the idea, but it’s a raw deal for the public.

When ABC News Now launched on a test basis in 2004, it was available free over the air for several months on local multicast DTV channels. We won’t see that again, apparently—and it gets worse:

In addition to supplying the local news segments, the ABC affiliates would be expected to integrate the local and national feeds and distribute the package to local cable operators via a fiber or microwave link or by broadcasting it in encrypted form over a digital channel.

Because of the encryption, viewers with digital TVs would not be able to receive the service off the air.

That would be an outrage.
Read the rest of this entry »

At an FCC hearing last night in Portland, Me., addressing localism and media ownership rules, Commissioner Michael J. Copps urged the regulatory body to “restore meaningful public-interest responsibilities to our broadcast media.”

He wants the FCC to follow through on, among other measures, bringing public-interest obligations into the digital TV era:

…let’s make sure that all that new digital capacity we’re giving broadcasters returns something positive for our communities and local talent and civic issues coverage. If your local broadcaster is given the privilege to multicast half a dozen program streams into your communities and homes, is it too much to expect that some good portion of that should be used to enhance localism and diversity?

Earlier:
• Multicast must-carry? Put public interest first