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Court yanks down FCC's broadcast flag
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FCC: Open up TV waves to wireless
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signals at the source, or "head-end," so that the conversion to analog happens along the cable wires and no conversion box is necessary.
"Give us the flexibility to down-convert," said Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and the transition will be "seamless." Patrick Knorr, vice chairman of the American Cable Association, which represents smaller companies, estimated that the upgrade would cost $4,500 per head-end for the company and nothing extra for the subscriber.
But broadcasters don't like the idea of down-conversion, because they fear cable companies will use it to reduce the quality of local broadcast channels or drop certain channels entirely. They want Congress to require that cable companies transmit all of their channels' streams, not simply the analog ones, which current law requires.
"If these channels are not reaching cable and satellite subscribers, Telemundo and other Spanish language broadcasters will be unable to attract sufficient advertisers," testified Manuel Abud, vice president and general manager of KVEA-TV in Los Angeles, on behalf of the Spanish language network Telemundo.
Cable companies, in return, argue that meeting the broadcasters' demands would occupy space on their frequencies that could have been used to host other technologies such as high-speed links or voice over Internet protocol.
On the other side of the coin, panelists touted the benefits of freeing up the analog spectrum for emergency personnel and new broadband technology.
Others looked forward to using the spectrum to provide wireless broadband, because signals on the 700 MHz frequency have the potential to travel farther and in a straighter line. "You can go out and build a rural broadband network at one-third the cost if you go into the TV band," Calabrese, of the New America Foundation, said.
Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, released a statement on Tuesday announcing that later this week, she will introduce a bill called the Low Power Digital Television Transition Assistance Act, which will focus on "giving translator and low power analog stations more time to transition, along with grants to ease the cost."
In the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, pledged in a statement to work with the Senate to approve legislation this year: "Establishing a firm deadline will help ensure that police and firefighters meet their critical communications needs, that consumers receive the benefits of next-generation wireless broadband services and that Congress further reduces the deficit."
No draft bill for the digital television transition has surfaced yet.
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Money to line legislator pockets.
Money for the FCC's spectrum auctions.
Money for TV and converter manufacturers.
Money for the sundry broadcast & media interests who get to hike fees for mandatory digital service.
And of course, money for the landfills when they find themselves inundated with millions of analog sets.
What else did I miss?
A round of applause for our representatives! Makes the world go round.
operations, but you made it successfully. Sounds like it's about
time to give the old TV's to Goodwill and go see what has
happened since you bought them. TV isn't your mother's Dumont
anymore. The world always changes- it's your choice to get left
behind.
automatically monitor viewing habits, due to a link which
transmits data both ways?
It's not only Good-by to analogue, but also to privacy and civil
liberties.
Cable and Satellite already can monitor what people watch, if they want to do so.
To speed the adoption of digital television, a 3-tiered approach is what is needed, similar to what follows:
1. A cutoff date after which all televisions must include a digital tuner. It is ridiculous that with the analog broadcast cutoff date looming just a few years away that Best Buy and Wal-Mart are still selling analog-only televisions.
2. A cutoff date for all broadcasters to broadcast in digital (while simulcasting in analog). After this date, new televisions will no longer require an analog tuner.
3. A cutoff date for analog broadcasts.
I think that this or a similar approach would allow for a smoother transition to all-digital broadcasting.
As for me, I am one of those people that still watches over-the-air broadcast television. I have no interest in getting cable or sattelite. Both of these options are ridiculously overpriced in this day and age, and while I could easily afford it, I do not believe that the content is worth what they are charging. Later this month, I plan to build my own DVR (MythTV) with digital tuners. It will function as you described, the only thing is that it will be more expensive than what you are talking about. At first, I will use it with my analog television, but in the future I will likely purchase a high-definition monitor.
Although CableCard is FCC mandated, the current implementation stinks. There is currently no CableCard solution for PCs yet (although Microsoft is working on it for the next edition of Media Center).
But, for those of us that use freeware solutions (I use MythTV on Linux), I can't make the transition to digital (cleanly). There are no PCI cards that support CableCard (that I'm aware of), and when they do come, who's going to make the specifications available so that Linux can use them? My only solution is to have three set-top boxes that I change channels with an IR blaster (or if I'm lucky, Firewire). Why three? Because I have three analog tuners at the moment.
TiVo owners are equally screwed as well until their CableCard solutions come out.
The cable operators are really pushing for this because they want to lock up their content. Part of this locking means that PVRs won't be able to do anything with the data at all, so you can't transfer to a PC, skip commercials, or anything else that you can currently do with an unencrypted analog signal.
-- Joe
On the other hand, in some ways DTV is NOT better technology. There is, and will not be, a digital version of that 2.5" portable TV mentioned earlier. Not with ATSC at any rate; you'll have to get that kind of thing via a subscripion from your cell phone company, for instance.
The FCC must remember that the nation's economy is currently in very poor shape. Most people today still do not own high-definition wide-screen televisions because they are so expensive ($3,000+ for a 42-inch flat-panel set; even 17 to 23" FP sets cost close to a grand or more). Remember, many people these days are struggling just to make ends meet and simply do not have the money to spend on luxuries such as HDTV. Case in point: I live near Cleveland, Ohio, which is the poorest city in the entire country. I do not know anyone in my area who has an HDTV receiver or even cares about the technology. The television stations in Cleveland are all broadcasting HD signals along with analog, but for the most part I think the digital transmitters, towers, etc. are a waste of money because there simply aren't that many HDTV sets in this area yet. Some day there may be more such receivers in the Cleveland area (and in other parts of the country), but for the time being, those digital signals are, for the most part, going unwatched here.
I don't think all the millions of analog TVs now in use in this country will "go dark" when digital takes hold in 2009 or whenever. There are still far more analog TVs here than digital HD sets, so cable companies will have to make allowances for those millions of sets, either by the use of converter boxes (as I use on my own RCA analog TV, bought new just 5 1/2 years ago) or by converting the digital signals to analog on the cable, thereby eliminating the need for a converter in the first place. Most major cable operators, such as Comcast in my area, have ways to accomodate the millions of analog sets which may well still be in use four years from now. Face facts: People are not going to discard perfectly good analog TV sets just because the FCC will outlaw analog broadcasting after 2009. Personally, I think a better solution would have been for the FCC to require a compatibility standard for HDTV, which would operate the same as compatible color TV does: so that a color signal could be viewed directly on a monochrome set in b&w. Such a compatibility standard for HD television would save consumers the expense of purchasing a new high-definition set when the broadcasting standards change. I think the only reason the FCC specified the current HDTV system, which is absolutely incompatible with ordinary, unmodified analog sets, is so that the agency can make more and more and more money from the auctioning of the old analog channels. That's all this whole analog TV cutoff date monkey business is to me--just another way the FCC has dreamed up to line its own pockets. The analog signals will be outlawed, the old analog TV channels will be freed for use by HDTV stations and public service (or whatever), and the FCC will just be raking in the money from the spectrum auctions, the desires and needs of the general public be darned.
- one more way to make us pay
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by bedlam6666
December 24, 2007 8:20 PM PST
- I think it was a Tom Petty song that said something about we
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Reply to this comment
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See all 22 Comments >>now have to pay for what we used to get for free. Basically, with
this act, free TV is gone forever when you take into conderation
the cost of the converters. I don't have cable. I use an antenna. I
don't care. Call me weird. if it goes away I will not miss it. I
stopped watching baseball on TV years ago--and I was a huge
fan--because I could no longer see any games without paying
for them, either with a premium service, or just a regular
channel on cable.
I'll use the internet, play video games, watch DVDs, or better yet,
read a book or go to the gym. Everyone would be better off
doing that, and would be smarter or healthier for it.
Does anyone really care, truly, about who wins American Idol?