DTV thoughts

Two days and counting into infinity...DTV is here and appears that the transition was fairly seamless despite the fact that many have been left out in the cold and the whole process was a nightmare. Stephen Bates [teacher at the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas] wrote the following in the Spring 2008 issue of The Wilson Quarterly.

"The Day the TV Died"

"'DTV' IS COMING (AND SOONER THAN YOU THINK!)" proclaims the Federal Communications Commission website. With, perhaps, a touch of ­panic?

by

Stephen Bates

Spring 2008

The Wilson Quarterly

Digital ­television—­DTV—­will replace the venerable analog format on February 17, 2009, at midnight, time zone by time zone. The changeover won't affect most Americans who get TV by cable or satellite, or those who already own digital TVs or converters, or the handful of iconoclasts (less than two percent of households) who don't own TVs at all. But that leaves millions of people at risk of severe entertainment ­deficit.

By various estimates, between 10 and 15 percent of American households watch ­over-­the-­air programming exclusively, relying on rabbit ears, rooftop contraptions, and other gear from the I Love Lucy era. A third of these People of the Airwaves don't know about the digital shift, according to a poll by the Consumer Reports National Research Center. If DTV arrived tomorrow, some 20 million Americans would turn on American Idol and find Randy, Paula, and Simon replaced by snow.

People will be able to continue watching ­over-­the-­air broadcasts on analog TVs if they get converter boxes, which currently cost around $60. The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration is offering every household two coupons, each worth $40 toward a converter. According to the poll, though, ­three-­fourths of Americans haven't heard about the ­coupons.

That's not the only ­complication.

After DTV Day, some ­households—­about one in 20, according to FCC chairman Kevin ­Martin—­will have to spring for new antennas to pick up the same ­channels.

The February 17 deadline doesn't apply to the nation's 2,100 ­low-­powered TV stations, which include many rural and ­university-­run outlets. If you want to watch those channels with a converter, you'll need a special one with "analog pass-through," or an antenna switch, or the patience to disconnect your antenna from the converter and connect it to the ­TV.

The digital converter replaces your TV's tuner, so it comes with its own remote. Unless you buy and program a universal remote, you'll use the converter's remote to change channels and the TV’s remote to adjust ­volume—­alongside, perhaps, the armamentarium of DVD and VCR remotes. Speaking ofVCRs, if you want to record one program while watching another, you'll need two converters. If each of the converters happens to be, say, a Zenith model DTT900, then using the remote to change channels on the TV converter will also cause the channels to change on the VCR converter. "Yeah, that's a problem," a clerk at Circuit City told ­me.

The DTV disruption comes by federal decree, and Congress has its reasons. Because the digital format is far more efficient, it can produce sharper images, enable broadcasters to offer additional channels or data services, and free up spectrum space for wireless broadband, ­public-­safety communications, and other uses. The United States isn't alone in this process. In Great Britain, the transition is already under way, region by region, to be completed in 2012. Finland went all-digital on September 1, 2007. In most of the world, digital will soon be the television standard.

These transitions can be ticklish, as we’re likely to discover next February. But standards themselves mostly make life easier. Standardization is "the liberator that relegates the problems that have been already solved to their proper place," insurance expert Albert Whitney wrote in 1928. Back then, standardization had a long way to go. Imagine buying sheets when beds came in 78 sizes. Washers in household faucets, The New York Times said in 1927, were "almost impossible to replace, even in supply stores in large cities."

At the time, an engineer was striving to tame the anarchy. Shortly after President Warren G. Harding made him secretary of commerce, in 1921, Herbert Hoover established the Division of Simplified Practice. ("Simplified" was chosen, a Commerce official explained, because "standardized" sounded "Prussian.") The agency helped establish national standards for everything from ­pick­axes to grape ­baskets.

The federal simplifiers aimed to facilitate rather than dictate. In 1923, for instance, they assembled some 200 representatives of the lumber industry, who decided that the standard construction board would be 25/32 of an inch thick. Hoover called it "a splendid example of industry solving its own problems."

But the solution wasn't universally acclaimed. Companies that manufactured thinner boards, 24/32 of an inch, wanted their measure to be the norm. In "the battle of the 32nd"—Hoover's jocular ­phrase—­they ­lost.

That's the common pattern. When standards are set, somebody wins and somebody ­loses.

In the major skirmishes over broadcast standards, David Sarnoff was the winner. Born in Russia in 1891, Sarnoff arrived in the United States at the age of nine, unable to speak any English. In his teens, he studied Morse code and landed a job at American Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, first as an office boy and then as a telegrapher. When Guglielmo Marconi visited his company's U.S. branch, Sarnoff connived to meet him and soon became his protégé. In 1919, the federal government voiced misgivings about ­British-­owned Marconi controlling vital American technology. General Electric bought American Marconi and shifted its key assets to a new firm, Radio Corporation of America. Among those key assets was Sarnoff. He soared through the company's ranks, reaching the presidency a decade ­later.

Well before most executives and engineers, Sarnoff saw the future of ­TV—­some reporters called him a "televisionary"—and he plotted to put RCA at the forefront, whatever it took. "Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in men," he once remarked. Within the company, broadcast historian Alex McKenzie writes, Sarnoff's rages "could strike like a thunderbolt." Sarnoff sought not just to make history but to ensure his place in it. Horatio Alger comparisons irked him, because he considered his ascent unparalleled. At RCA, he had copies of his own memos bound in ­leather.

In 1930, when Sarnoff became head of RCA, a handful of American television stations operated on an experimental, noncommercial basis. But ­would-­be viewers, mostly shortwave hobbyists, had a hard time tuning in. "Various frequencies were used, some in the standard broadcast band and some in the short­wave bands," historians John Ryder and Donald Fink write in their encomium to electrical engineering, Engineers and Electrons (1984). "There were no standards for the number of lines or number of pictures per second used by these stations, and no attention was paid to the bandwidth required to carry the transmissions."

Commercial TV, Sarnoff often said, was "just around the corner." But the corner kept receding. In 1936, at one of Sarnoff's demonstrations, E. B. White watched the TV image jitter and undulate. "President Roosevelt's face not only came and went," he observed, "it came and went under water." The picture traveled from the studio by wire to RCA's transmitter, then by ether to the screen in front of White. "The magical unlikelihood of this occasion," he wrote, "was not lessened any by the fact that a stranger wearing a telephone around his neck was crawling about on all fours in the darkness at our feet. This didn’t make television seem any too practical for the living room of one’s own home, although of course homes are changing."

Regulators agreed: TV wasn't yet ­living-­room ­ready. Members of the Federal Radio Commission and its successor, the FCC, hesitated to set broadcast standards. "Rigid adoption of standards at this state of the art," the FCC said in 1939, "may either 'freeze' the television industry, and thus retard future development, or may result in a high rate of obsolescence of equipment purchased by the public." A year later, the commission warned that Americans "should not be inflicted with a hodgepodge of different television broadcasting and receiving sets."

But without standards, a hodgepodge already existed. In 1938, Communicating Systems Inc. marketed TVs for $150 (three-inch screen) and $250 (five-inch screen), with ­one-­year ­guarantees—­not that the sets wouldn't break, but that they wouldn't become wholly obsolete. By the end of 1939, American Television, DuMont, Andrea Radio Corporation, General Electric, and RCA were selling TVs too. Everything from the number of channels to the hue of the images (black and white or black and green) varied from set to set. Gutsy early adopters bought TVs, but dueling standards and scant programming scared off most ­consumers.

In 1939, the FCC authorized television to take a small step forward. Experimental stations could adopt "limited commercialization"—that is, sell ads to pay for creating programs but not for broadcasting them. Commercial TV was to have a soft rollout. "No interests should be permitted to raise public hopes falsely," the FCC stressed. In particular, "nothing should be done which will encourage a large public investment in receivers which . . . may become obsolete in a relatively short time."

But ­self-­restraint wasn't Sarnoff’s style. He bought ­full-­page ads touting discounted RCA sets, which could receive RCA's shows but not those of some other broadcasters. The era of home TV wasn't just around the corner, he ­said—­it was here. This was precisely the sort of hype the FCC had tried to prevent. The commission suspended the limited commercial broadcasting and chastised ­RCA.

Sarnoff was unapologetic. In his view, consumers would willingly risk obsolescence in order to enjoy television. A TV buyer, he said, "is paying for the unique privilege of seeing what is important or interesting today in a program of news, information, entertainment, education, and sports events which he cannot witness tomorrow or next year, however great the technical improvements. . . . The miracle of sight transmitted through the air should not be treated on the [same] basis of obsolescence as a spring hat."

A television costing hundreds of dollars is no spring hat. But under pressure from RCA, the FCC reversed course and de­cided to establish TV standards, even if they might later have to be changed. The commission sought recommendations from broadcasters. The understanding was that if broadcasters could achieve consensus, the FCC, like Herbert Hoover's Division of Simplified Practice, would go along.

Broadcasters formed the Na­tion­al Television Systems Committee. The NTSC had barely gotten started when CBS muddied the picture by announcing the development of color TV. Created by engineer Peter Goldmark, the CBS camera captured images through a rapidly spinning disc with red, blue, and green filters. This disc was synchronized with a disc spinning inside the TV. When the camera transmitted its red signal, the red filter on the receiver’s disc was positioned in front of the picture tube's electron ­beam.

In NTSC sessions, Zenith and ­Stromberg-­Carlson urged the adoption of CBS color, whereas RCA, General Electric, and other companies opposed it. Technical matters were secondary to "rival corporate interests," Joseph Udelson writes in The Great Television Race (1982). As newcomers to TV manufacturing, Zenith and ­Stromberg-­Carlson could gear up to make color TVs with no added costs. The other firms had spent heavily on equipment to produce ­black-­and-­white TVs. They didn't want to have to start over. In the end, the majority ruled: Color was, for the time being, ­kaput.

Of the other issues confronting the NTSC, the most contentious was the number of lines per TV image. The more lines, the greater the clarity. RCA wanted 441, Philco wanted 800, and DuMont argued that with the technology still evolving, flexibility would be ­ideal—­televisions should be capable of picking up broadcasts of anywhere be­tween 400 and 800 lines. (Some of the first TVs had used 60 lines, producing an effect somewhat like watching actors through ­half-­closed venetian blinds.) The NTSC rejected the wide range proposed by Du­Mont, saying it would make TVs pricier and images fuzzier, and set a standard of 525 lines. According to The Tube (1996), by David Fisher and Marshall Jon Fish­er, the number had no technical advantage. It was simply a ­compromise.

Over DuMont's protests, the FCC adopted the NTSC ­standards—­the ba­sic rules that have governed analog TV ever ­since—­and authorized stations to go fully commercial. RCA opened 10 service centers around New York where consumers could take their TVs to be retrofitted, without charge, to conform to the new standards. On July 1, 1941, RCA station WNBT (later WNBC) went on the air. Its first ad, which was sold for $4, showed a Bulova clock as the second hand circled the face, to the tune of the Minute Waltz. The ticking seconds marked the beginning of the television ­era.

While the fight over television standards was raging, Sarnoff was also boosting TV through what Fortune later called "the biggest and bitterest ­behind-­the-­scenes fight" in radio's ­history—­against a ­friend.

As an undergraduate at Columbia University, Edwin Howard Armstrong made commercial radio feasible: He found a way to amplify the output so that broadcasts could play through speakers instead of ­stethoscope-­like earphones. The Armstrong method also allowed receivers to pick up transmissions from previously inconceivable distances, across the Atlantic and the Pacific. During World War I, Armstrong developed the "superheterodyne," with which ­radios and later ­televisions could be tuned precisely to ­broadcasts.

One of the people who saw Armstrong demonstrate his amplifying invention, in a basement lab at Columbia, was Sarnoff. The two became friends. Armstrong frequently visited Sarnoff's house for morning coffee; Sarnoff attended Armstrong's ­wedding—­to Sarnoff's former secretary. RCA bought licenses for some of Armstrong's patents and disputed the validity of others, which made for an odd friendship. When a decision in Armstrong's favor was handed down in one lawsuit, Sarnoff congratulated him on the ruling even as RCA denounced ­it.

"I wish that someone would come up with a little black box to eliminate static," Sarnoff remarked to Armstrong at one point in the early 1920s. In Empire of the Air (1991), Tom Lewis speculates that Sarnoff envisioned a filter between a radio's receiver and its speaker. Instead, Armstrong found that he could eliminate static by modulating the frequency of a broadcast instead of its ­amplitude—­that is, by using what we know as FM instead of AM. Like a 441-line screen and an 800-line one, FM and AM were incompatible. FM sets couldn't get AM, and vice ­versa.

In 1933, Armstrong demonstrated FM to Sarnoff, who recognized the discovery as both ingenious and perilous. RCA sold AM sets and owned two AM networks. With its clarity, FM could kill AM. (Armstrong thought it would.) In addition, Sarnoff was pushing television. FM and TV would inevitably compete for spectrum space and for consumer ­dollars.

Armstrong ­fine-­tuned the technology, and experimental FM broadcasts began. Time rhapsodized, "The enthusiasts say that they hear music faithful to the topmost tweet, the bottommost woof; that speech seems to come from the next chair, instead of the next telephone booth; that if an announcer should scratch a match, listeners would hear it burst into flame; that between numbers there is no hum, no crackle, just black, velvety nothing." The FCC assigned FM to the spectrum just below TV and authorized commercial operation in 1940. The commission also ruled that television broadcasts would use FM for sound. For the duration of Armstrong’s patent, TV manufacturers would have to pay him ­royalties.

FM took off. Hundreds of thousands of people bought receivers. But after Pearl Harbor, the government halted production of FM radios. And, like the Soviet Union, the FCC switched sides during the war. Having earlier championed FM, the commission now skewered ­it.

On June 27, 1945, the FCC announced that sun­spots and atmospheric conditions were interfering with FM broadcasts. An expected sunspot ­flare-­up in 1949 and 1950 could prove disastrous. The commission had a point, according to Dale Hatfield, a telecommunications professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Sunspots have caused static on channel 2 of analog TVs, and FM was lower on the spectrum, where interference was likelier.

In response, the commission took three steps. First, it transferred FM up to its current bandwidth and assigned most of the old spectrum to television. Second, it ordered all FM stations to change to the new frequencies by the end of 1946, a lightning-fast transition. (Digital TV, by contrast, has been in the works for more than a decade.) Finally, and inexcusably, the commission refused to let stations broadcast on both old and new frequencies during the transition. (Currently, most TV stations are broadcasting in digital as well as analog.)

Although RCA was on record opposing the change, many people discerned the hand of Sarnoff. Build a better mousetrap, he once remarked, and somebody will develop "a virulent poison which is death on mice and there will be no longer any demand for mousetraps."

The FCC said it wanted to boot FM ­up-­spectrum "before a considerable investment is made by the listening public in receiving sets and by the broadcasters in transmitting equipment." In truth, a considerable investment had already been made. As of mid-1945, there were 53 FM stations, and they were broadcasting to a ­half-­million receivers. The change of technical standards meant that broadcasters’ and consumers' equipment would become ­obsolete soon and suddenly.

Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the chair of the FCC resigned to become general counsel at NBC, a division of RCA, after the spectrum decision. It later emerged, too, that RCA had sent FCC commissioners free televisions during the FM ­hearings.

Armstrong and others fought the FCC’s decisions to no avail. In order to receive FM programming without interruption, a consumer needed two receivers—one for the old bandwidth and one for the new—or a receiver designed to get broadcasts on both bandwidths. Broadcast stations had to retool their equipment, at an average cost of more than $1 million apiece. Starting from scratch, most FM stations in the postwar years simply simulcast AM broadcasts, a move that diminished FM’s appeal to consumers and advertisers alike. "Despite its later resurgence," Hans Fantel wrote in The New York Times in 1981, "FM never fully recovered from this blow. Neither did Armstrong."

The prediction that sunspots would devastate FM had come from Kenneth Alva Norton, a War Department engineer. When the sunspots flared, the interference on the old FM spectrum was minor. Armstrong asked Norton if he'd made a mistake. "Oh, certainly," Norton replied. "I think that can happen frequently to people who make predictions on the basis of partial information. It happens every day."

Armstrong's troubles weren’t over. RCA next took the position that his FM patents were invalid, so he wasn't entitled to royalties from the sale of televisions that used FM for sound. Armstrong filed suit in 1948. During his deposition, David Sarnoff said of Armstrong, "We were close friends. I hope we still are," then insisted that RCA engineers had invented ­FM.

On January 31, 1954, with the legal struggle dragging on, Armstrong wrote a note to his wife, Marion: "God keep you and may the Lord have mercy on my soul." Wearing a suit, scarf, and gloves, he jumped out the window of his 13th-floor apartment.

Shaken upon hearing the news, Sarnoff unthinkingly told a friend, "I did not kill Armstrong." A few months later, RCA settled the lawsuit and agreed to pay Marion Armstrong $1 million. RCA had licensed other companies to manufacture FM equipment, and those companies continued to fight, but one judge after another upheld the validity of the Armstrong patents. In the end, Marion Armstrong collected another $10 ­million.

In the 1950s, another change in standards loomed. Though not at first, Sarnoff ultimately won. No fatalities were ­recorded.

The FCC in 1940 had cited "promising experiments with color television"—namely, the color disc developed by Peter ­Goldmark—­but, heeding the NTSC’s recommendation, declined to establish color standards. CBS tried again in 1946, but regulators adopted the same position they had in the 1930s concerning black-and-white TV: "The Commission must be satisfied not only that the system proposed will work but also that it is as good as can be expected within a reasonable time to come."

CBS color technology was incompatible with existing ­black-­and-­white TVs. If the FCC adopted CBS standards, older sets would continue to receive black-and-white programs but not color ones. To see those programs, owners would have to buy either a color TV or a converter projected to cost at least $­100.

When CBS again asked the FCC to adopt its system, in 1949, RCA announced that it had almost perfected a compatible, ­all-­electronic version, without any "horse and buggy" spinning discs. The FCC demanded a ­head-­to-­head comparison, to Sarnoff's consternation. On RCA prototypes at that point, colors were produced separately and combined by a system of mirrors. The mirrors were easily jostled, throwing the colors askew. On test day, Sarnoff later recalled, "the monkeys were green, the bananas were blue, and everyone had a good laugh."

The prospect of obsolescence hadn't troubled Sarnoff in the past. With black-and-white TV, he had argued that consumers deserved to enjoy the technology right away, even if the equipment might soon be obsolete. The spectrum shift for FM, which seemingly had Sarnoff's backstage blessing, had rendered a half-million receivers outdated. Now Sarnoff found himself in a different position. RCA made TVs, and NBC broadcast to them. Compatibility was essential. "A compatible system in television," Sarnoff told U.S. News and World Report, "is more or less the same as a compatible marriage, where the husband and wife see the same thing at the same time and don’t get into a lot of wavy motions."

Like Sarnoff, the FCC ­flip-­flopped. "Obviously, it is essential that all receivers be capable of receiving all transmissions," the commission had said in 1941, concerning ­black-­and-­white TV. Now it contended that, though compatibility would be optimal, consumers wanted color and CBS had the better technology. Goldmark's disc became the official standard. Sarnoff fought the FCC decision all the way to the Supreme Court, unsuccessfully.

With color TV, as with FM a decade earlier, Sarnoff profited from war. When the Korean War escalated in 1951, the government barred nonmilitary uses of cobalt, a component in CBS color TVs. Manufacture of the new TVs had to be postponed.

Meanwhile, RCA engineers continued working. By the end of the war in 1953, RCA color was about the same as CBS color, and it was compatible with black-and-white TVs. RCA achieved compatibility by transmitting brightness and color separately. Black-and-white sets got brightness; color sets got both.

While developing compatible color, Sarnoff had also slashed prices and sold black-and-white TVs as fast as he could, in order to raise the political costs of an incompatible system. "Every set we get out there makes it that much tougher on CBS," he said. The number of black-and-white TVs soared, from nine million in 1950 to 23 million in ­1953.

The NTSC reconvened, compared the two systems, and recommended RCA color. In a gracious gesture, Peter Goldmark seconded the motion to kill his invention. Late in 1953, the FCC adopted the RCA standard. David Sarnoff had won again.

For the typical technology, death comes slowly. Consumers chose VHS over Betamax two decades ago, but individual Betamax players continued to work. Though Toshiba, maker of HD DVDs, surrendered to Sony and its Blu-ray technology this winter in the high-definition DVD war, early adopters who guessed wrong still have functioning machines. Prerecorded HD DVDs may be few, and blank discs, like Betamax tapes, may disappear from stores, but the life span of the players won’t be affected.

Consumer products—video recording devices, vacuums, answering machines—die every day, but not by the thousands or millions, all at once. Mass obsolescence can occur when devices exchange information or value, and a central authority, usually the government, alters the standards of exchange. On many subway systems today, you can't go anywhere without a fare card. Tokens, like prewar FM receivers, have quit working. The old standards of exchange no longer ­apply.

Decisions about standards frequently reflect the clout of their proponents. "New machines are not accepted because they are, in some abstract sense, 'better,'" Steven Lubar, a professor of American civilization at Brown University, writes in InfoCulture (1993). "They're accepted because they fill the needs of some individual or group; and they are fought by people who feel that their economic or intellectual interests are at stake."

By some accounts, CBS's system of the early 1950s produced sharper color than RCA's but broke down more frequently. "It's very hard to say what’s a superior technology," Lubar observes. "What we think is superior in retrospect is often what we’re used to, after a lot of money has been invested in it." Following this pattern, the superiority of digital TV won't be apparent to a lot of Americans next ­February—­quite the ­contrary—­but most of them will come ­around.

"We’re the pipes," Sarnoff once said of broadcasting. He helped set the specs for the analog pipes that have served American TV for nearly 70 years. And no less important, he helped decide what flowed through ­them. During his lifetime (he died in 1971), the choices were limited: Uncle Miltie or Aunt Bea, Car 54 or Agent 99, Captain Kirk or Colonel Klink. Sarnoff thought the future would be different. The TV itself, he wrote, would be "a thin, flat-surface screen that will be hung like a picture on the wall." As for programs, "every form of art and every type of entertainment will be readily accessible in the home. The range and variety . . . will embrace everything created by the human mind."

On this, the televisionary's vision was clear. Today we have CNN, HBO, MTV, VHS, DVD, ­Blu-­ray, MPEG, Netflix, and YouTube. Unwatched TiVo shows pile up like unread New Yorkers, network websites offer ­full-­length programs, and iPhone users peer at 3.5-inch screens. Program choices are virtually limitless. That turns out to be bad news for Sarnoff's NBC, along with CBS and ­ABC—­their audience share has ­plummeted—­but great news for ­viewers.

Some Americans, who have tuned out the urgency of the FCC in favor of the urgency of CSI, will be startled by static at midnight on February 17. For everybody else, digital TV will be pretty much the same as analog TV, just a bit sharper, with a few more ­channels.

The digital changeover is revolutionary for broadcasters. But for viewers, the revolution began years ­ago.

Digital is here

And so the day has arrived. Television has changed. The hype for digital doesn't measure up. We were told of more stable and better signals as well as additional channels. The signals are better but I have spent too much time getting up and fussing with the antenna when the image begins to pixelate, the audio becomes broken, and I am informed that there is "no signal". Explain that to a feline curled on a lap. The additional channels? That's a joke. By far the additional channels are religious oriented: Kid Jesus shows, MTV knockoffs, Benny Hinn curing people in HD; subdigital weather channels that are mostly an advertising venue; public television's numbing bombardment of Norm Abram, Lidia Bastianich, Mark Bittman, Jacques Pépin, Steven Raichlen, Joanne Weir, "America's Test Kitchen", "This Old House"; and a channel called "this" that purports to be the repository of the entire film libraries of MGM, United Artist, RKO Radio, and American International and insists on repetitive airing, for the most part, of such worthy, classic films as Beach Blanket Bingo, Gator, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Malone, Tentacles, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, and horribly made-for-TV specials. On fairness, "this" does offer now and then a quality classic film...John Frankenheimer's The Train, Stanley Kubrick's Killers Kiss, The Little Foxes. For us with the analog converter, we are doomed.

Face it, the whole idea was for the government to make some bucks by auctioning bandwidth to telecommunication companies and making television digital. It backfired. It forced citizens to purchase expensive cable or satellite subscriptions, buy a new television, or retain the old [and paid for] television supplemented with a conversion device. The telecommunication companies made money, television manufacturers made money, television retailers made money, equipment suppliers to broadcasting stations made money, converter manufacturers made money. And it cost the federal government millions in advertising and subsides.

Also, we will be treated to roadside trash of discarded televisions along with bagged refuse, air conditioner compressors, tires, and automobile batteries..."Whoopee, we all are gonna die!"

"Millions Still Unprepared for — Gulp — Tomorrow’s DTV Transition"

by

Priya Ganapati

June 11th, 2009

Wired

The switch to digital television will be final Friday as television stations nationwide shut off analog broadcasting. Yet about 2.8 million American households, or 2.5 percent of the television market, are likely to see snow on their TV screens instead of Law Order or House re-runs, according to research firm Nielsen.

"Some people wait till the last minute for everything no matter what," says Scott Wallsten, senior fellow at the think-tank Technology Policy Institute. "This means there are some folks there waiting to make a last-minute dash to the store."

The government had set Feb. 17 as the initial deadline for the switch to digital transmission. But that led to fears that millions of couch potatoes would be left in the cold as funding for converter box coupons that can make analog TV sets digital-ready could fall short. Just weeks before the February deadline, the government postponed the transition by four months, with June 12 as the new cutoff.

That decision may have paid off. In the last three months, the number of households that are completely unready for the change has been cut in half to 2.8 million homes from 5.8 million, says Nielsen. "Given the importance that television plays in the day-to-day life of most people, we expect that most of the remaining unready homes will take the necessary steps to get ready once the stations make the final switch to digital transmission," says Sara Erichson, President Media Client Services, Nielsen.

The National Association of Broadcasters says consumers are taking steps — slowly — to get DTV ready. The group estimates 2.2 million households are still unprepared for the transition. About 3 percent of those have applied for or already received converter-box coupons from the federal government. Many, while while aware of the transition, have not yet taken any action to prepare for it, they say.

"In a free society, we would never expect to see 100 percent consumer participation in a technological change like the digital television transition," says Jonathan Collegio, NAB vice president of digital television. "Some viewers will make a conscious decision to not upgrade, and that is their choice. Over time, however, we expect many of these viewers to eventually make the switch."

The process of getting a digital converter box, though, has been fraught with challenges. The converter boxes can cost between $40 and $80. But a government-issued $40 coupon (limit of two for each household) can subsidize almost all or most of the cost. In January, the coupon program faced a shortage of funds but a government bailout brought more money to the process.

More than $1.5 billion was earmarked for digital-converter coupons. Still, young adults, African American households and Hispanic homes are disproportionately unready for the change, says Nielsen, while the elderly are the most ready.

Among the 56 local markets that Nielsen measures, Albuquerque-Santa Fe is the least ready with 7.6 percent of households completely unprepared, says the company. The markets with the most unready households tend to be in the Western United States, where cable penetration is lower, says Nielsen.

Still the money spent, so far, on the DTV transition will pay off, says Wallsten.

"The important thing to remember is that the transition is going to be bring a lot of benefits," he says. "Reclaiming the spectrum allows it to be used for something more valuable than TV broadcasting like consumer broadband."

Meanwhile, folks that still have the rabbit ears on their TVs might pick up a book for the weekend.

"Are you ready to go digital? TV stations set to sign off analog on Friday"

by

Aaron Barnhart

June 11th, 2009

The Kansas City Star

Something that probably hasn’t happened since you were a kid is taking place at 9 a.m. Friday.

All across Kansas City, television stations will be signing off the air.

The thing is, if everything goes according to plan, you won't even notice.

Six decades of broadcasting analog TV signals — the method first demonstrated by Philo Farnsworth in 1928 — will come to an end as the country's TV stations obey the national deadline for ending analog transmission.

Technically, the stations have until 11:59 p.m. Friday, and one station was given until July 12. However, the city's broadcasters reached a mutual agreement to switch off at 9 a.m. in order to handle customer complaints during the daytime.

Each of the stations is required by law to have phone banks at the ready when it shuts down analog broadcasting.

For one day at least, anyone who has ever felt the frustration of navigating a TV station's switchboard will have no trouble.

Still, most viewers will be unaffected by the end of analog TV. Whether they know it or not, they’re already watching digital TV.

Time Warner Cable, Comcast, SureWest, U-Verse, DirecTV and Dish are the cable and satellite services by which nearly 90 percent of the metro area watches television, and they switched over to carrying the local stations' digital signals long ago.

Most of the remaining viewership has also switched, using converter boxes or new TV sets that they bought in response to months of drum-beating by the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC started warning viewers in earnest prior to the previous deadline in February. That was moved to June 12 after the Obama administration expressed concerns that too many viewers would not be switched over to digital in time.

"Anyone who thinks there's a chance of another delay had better wake up and smell the converter box," acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps said last week. "This is not a drill."

Flipping the switch

According to figures published this week by Nielsen Media Research, fewer than 2 percent of homes in the Kansas City area have no DTV options. Industry experts believe many of those who are described as "unready" won't notice because they use their TVs to watch DVDs and play video games. The best-prepared groups are viewers over 55 and African-Americans; least prepared are young adults and Hispanics.

Even among households that Nielsen considers "ready," however, there have been issues with signals fading — particularly during bad weather — and station engineers have been getting an earful from these viewers for months.

"I get calls from people in the inner city who get a beautiful signal, but when a car drives by they lose it," said Jim Moore, Fox 4 vice president of engineering. "All they have to do is adjust their antenna."

In the outlying areas, some viewers have been fiddling with their antennas for months.

"Sometimes there were stations we could get on the outdoor antenna going into our living room TV that we couldn't get on our bedroom TV, and there were stations we could get on our bedroom TV that we couldn’t get in our living room," said Roger Toomey, who lives in rural Cass County, 50 miles southeast of Kansas City.

Toomey, who majored in broadcasting in college, finally gave up and got a satellite dish. But that came at a cost: He must pay to receive Kansas City stations from Dish Network, and his selection of local channels is limited.

Digital broadcasting allows stations to "multicast," offering more than one program over the air. But Dish isn't obligated to carry multicast channels. As a result, Toomey no longer receives the three multicast channels offered by his favorite local station, KCPT.

"The Create channel that Channel 19 has on — we kinda got used to that," said Toomey. "We miss some of those extra channels."

Over the summer, several local stations will work on improving reception of their digital signals.

WDAF, which has been broadcasting digitally at 80 percent of maximum power, will boost the signal to 100 percent after shutting off its analog signal.

KCPT will also boost its power because its digital signal will no longer cause interference problems for an analog station in Salina, Kan.

People who watch KSMO-TV over the air will benefit later this summer when KSMO's sister station KCTV-5 removes its analog antenna from its broadcast tower on 31st Street — the free-standing "Eye-full Tower" — and moves KSMO's antenna there from its current home in eastern Jackson County.

With analog transmission most area stations have been able to reach about 2 million people, but maps provided by the FCC estimate that the average Kansas City station's coverage will expand significantly and reach as many as 2.3 million viewers as far away as southern Bates and northern DeKalb counties in Missouri as well as the west end of Topeka.

Technically, the analog age won't end until July 12, because KMBC has been authorized to serve as the area's "nightlight" station. Starting at 9 a.m. Friday, Channel 9 will air, on its analog signal only, a program advising viewers, in both English and Spanish, that it's time for them to get a converter box. The program will loop continuously for 30 days.

Most stations in town, however, will power down their analog Friday morning. Most plan to display a countdown clock and information about reaching their customer-help lines. But some old broadcast hands would like to see one last tribute to the glory days of VHF, when channels 4, 5 and 9 were the only choices in town and stations signed off every night.

At WDAF — launched in 1949 by The Kansas City Star — Moore would like to see the old test pattern go up, the one with a Native American's profile on it. And some music to go with it.

"I think we should play the national anthem," Moore said. "We will be in our morning newscast and I think we should end the news a minute early, put up the Indian head and play the national anthem."


Barbara Eliasson's digital confrontation

Digital is near

The start up time for all digital television is June 12th and all is not good.

"Millions Face Blank Screens in TV Switch"

by

Stephen Labaton

June 6th, 2009

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Millions of households will lose television reception next week when about 1,000 broadcasters around the nation shut off their analog signals and complete their conversion to digital programming, federal officials say.

The government has spent more than $2 billion to ease the transition to digital television, and in the last few months has cut in half the number of households that are unprepared for the final conversion on June 12. But the latest survey by the Nielsen Company indicates that as of the end of May, more than 10 percent of the 114 million households that have television sets are either completely or partly unprepared.

Michael J. Copps, the acting head of the Federal Communications Commission, said that the people most likely to lose reception are society's most vulnerable — lower-income families, the elderly, the handicapped and homes where little or no English is spoken. The transition will also hit inner-city and rural areas hardest, he said.

"We are much better prepared than we were in February, when the original transition was to have occurred, but there will nonetheless be significant disruptions," Mr. Copps said in an interview. "In the past five months we've tried to accomplish what should have been done over the last four years."

More than three million homes that do not subscribe to cable or satellite services are totally unprepared for the transition and will lose their reception, according to Nielsen. Another nine million homes that subscribe to cable or satellite services but that have spare television sets — typically in bedrooms and kitchens — that are not connected to any service are also expected to lose reception. The conversion does not affect cable or satellite distribution.

And officials say that millions more who thought they were prepared are likely to experience technical problems like poor reception or improperly connected antennas. Their problems arise because the way the digital signal travels is different from analog and can be more affected by topography, weather or even heavy auto traffic.

A list of 49 particularly vulnerable markets includes New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, Boston and Dallas-Fort Worth. Officials said Puerto Rico is also among the most susceptible to problems, as it has the highest rate of households that receive their television signals over the air.

In the New York broadcasting market, 92,000 homes are completely unready for the transition and another 348,000 are partly unready, according to Nielsen. That represents almost 6 percent of households in the region.

Early this year, the administration persuaded Congress to postpone completion of the transition to June, from February, and to provide another $650 million, mostly for coupons for converter boxes, on top of the $1.5 billion that had already been spent by the Bush administration.

The Obama administration has enlisted dozens of groups, including AmeriCorps, the national volunteer organization, civil rights groups and even firefighters to help people install the converter boxes and antennas. The program is the most ambitious technology transition effort since the Clinton administration's enormous Y2K program, which was set up to avert major software problems caused by the inability of computers to process data beginning on Jan. 1, 2000.

Concerned about a possible political reaction, President Obama issued a statement on Thursday urging consumers to take steps so they do not lose television reception. "We have worked hand in hand with state and local officials, broadcasters and community groups to educate and assist millions of Americans with the transition," Mr. Obama said.

"I want to be clear: there will not be another delay," the statement added.

Other officials said that the high number of households reflected the inclination of Americans to put things off.

"There are so many people who are always waiting until the last minute, whether it is college students doing term papers, or people filing taxes, or people like me who wait until Christmas Eve to do their shopping," said the commerce secretary, Gary F. Locke, in an interview on Friday.

While applauding the government efforts, he said he was frustrated that the early public service announcements did not provide specific enough information about the problem.

"Earlier on we could have more crisply and clearly indicated who was affected by the switch," he said. "I've been critical of the public service announcements that just say, 'The switch is coming' or 'Are you ready?'"

He added: "Too many people don't know the difference between digital and analog. I didn't even know myself until a few months ago when my brother-in-law explained it to me."

Analog technology transmits a video signal through an electronic impulse. Digital technology breaks the signal into 1's and 0's, allowing far more data to be transmitted through a far smaller amount of broadcast spectrum.

The transition has already been a huge windfall to television and equipment makers and retailers, as millions of consumers have had to buy digital television sets or converter boxes and special antennas for their old sets.

Shawn G. DuBravac, chief economist at the Consumer Electronics Association, said that sales of digital television sets were up 32 percent this year over the comparable period in 2008, even in the midst of a deep recession. Other officials at the association said the spike in sales was attributable to many factors, including declining prices and availability of more programs in digital, as well as the mandatory transition.

But consumer experts said that many households were buying more expensive television sets and equipment than they needed to continue to receive television signals. Polls by Consumer Reports found that many people were aware of the transition but were confused about how to navigate it, said Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst at Consumers Union.

Bracing for a wave of complaints, the Federal Communications Commission is preparing to fully staff a $40 million call center on Friday and through the weekend. The government will also continue to supply $40 coupons to households toward the purchase of converter boxes.

Officials advised consumers to rescan the channels of their television sets after the conversion was completed on Friday to make sure they were pulling in all the correct signals.

The conversion is the final step in a long-running plan for more efficient use of the broadcast spectrum. The plan took spectrum licenses from broadcasters, replacing them with other frequencies. It will reallocate some of the broadcasters' former spectrum to public safety providers. Other frequencies were sold for billions of dollars, primarily to the large wireless telephone companies, whose demand for spectrum has risen with the proliferation of hand-held devices that can surf the Internet and send and receive e-mail.

Consumers seeking assistance on how to upgrade their television sets or on the availability of digital stations in their communities can go to www.dtv.gov or call the government hot line on the transition at 1-888-CALLFCC (1-888-225-5322).


DTV and easy money...for whom?

DTV and easy money...for whom?

Told ya...

But there was an even bigger motivating factor: money.

The Bush White House, with the support of many Republicans, was pushing for tax cuts for wealthy Americans. They hoped to find a way to make up for the deficit of funds the U.S. Treasury would receive. The administration was also interested in finding new sources of revenue to help reduce the USA's growing deficit.

The solution: a spectrum auction.

By selling airwaves that had been given to broadcasters - free of charge - decades earlier, lawmakers figured they could raise $10 billion, at least. The spectrum could penetrate walls and other obstacles, making it ideal for wireless broadband and public safety communications.

"Digital TV coupon program hampered from the start"

by

Leslie Cauley

March 24th, 2009

USA TODAY

"Do you really think this will work?"

The question, posed by consumer advocate DeAnne Cuellar, was directed at Tony Wilhelm of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. It was February 2008, and Wilhelm, head of consumer education, had just explained the digital TV coupon program to a group of consumer advocates that included Cuellar.

The program, core to the government's plan to turn the USA into an all-digital TV market, offers $40 coupons — two per household — toward converter boxes that turn digital signals into analog. TVs that use antennas must have a converter; otherwise, they'll go dark once the switch happens. Cable and satellite TV customers aren't affected.

Cuellar, director of the Texas Media Empowerment Project in San Antonio, was concerned that the $1.34 billion program would run out of money before the nation's neediest — the poor, elderly and disabled — could apply. For many, she pointed out, free TV is their only connection to the outside world.

Wilhelm told her not to worry.

"He said most coupon programs have low redemption rates, so he didn't expect many people to use or even want financial assistance", Cuellar recalls.

She says Wilhelm cited grocery store coupons — for cereal, cleaning products and such — which have average redemption rates of 10% or less. "They were confident that everything would be fine."

Cuellar's recollection of the exchange is shared by two other people who attended the private briefing: Chris Murray, senior counsel for Consumers Union, and Gene Kimmelman, vice president of international policy for the same group. Wilhelm says he does not recall the meeting or the exchange.

As it turned out, everything was not fine. NTIA exhausted its budget just 10 months later, forcing Congress to scramble to keep the program afloat.

The coupon program "was supposed to help everyone who was losing a piece of equipment that was perfectly functional — their (analog) TV," says Kimmelman. "Instead, at every stage — from the drafting of the (DTV) bill to actual implementation — this program was set up to fail."

As envisioned by Congress, digital TV was supposed to give "free" TV, a fixture in U.S. living rooms for more than 50 years, a much-needed face lift. Instead, the program got so bogged down that lawmakers, in the midst of dealing with an epic financial crisis, had to run to the rescue.

Why did the program go off the rails so badly?

Interviews with more than a dozen current and former NTIA officials, consumer advocates, White House personnel and others suggest a combination of factors. Among them: bureaucratic bumbling, penny-pinching, NTIA's narrow interpretations of provisions in the DTV bill, and relentless warring about money between Republicans, who wanted to spend as little as possible on the DTV transition, and Democrats, who had concerns about funding from the start. Some sources would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they're not authorized to comment publicly and fear retribution from current and former employers.

Demand was seriously underestimated.

"There were so many hurdles and detours (for consumers) that the chances of the program working successfully were very small right from the beginning," says Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., former chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications Technology and the Internet, which has congressional oversight of NTIA.

NTIA's assumptions about the popularity of the coupons proved woefully off target. As of March 18, more than 54.2 million coupons had been requested, and 25.7 million redeemed. Average redemption rate to date: 55.7%.

The agency's miscalculations came into play in dramatic fashion in late December. In a conference call with reporters, Meredith Baker, then acting director, said NTIA was effectively out of money and would have to put consumers on a waiting list. Within days, more than 100,000 requests had piled up. By February, there were more than 4 million, and thousands of requests were pouring in daily.

Factoring in processing time — 4 to 6 weeks — wait-listed consumers had little hope of receiving their coupons in time to beat the DTV deadline, then set for Feb. 17. After a lot of haggling, Congress pushed back the DTV transition date by four months, to June 12. Lawmakers also included $650 million in new coupon funding in the stimulus package approved in February.

Ushering in a new era.

America's DTV plan has been a long time in the making. In 1996, the Federal Communications Commission and Congress started talking about ushering in a new era in TV broadcasting. Talk was spurred, in part, by the Telecom Act of 1996, which called for a transition to an all-digital TV format when most consumers had abandoned analog TV.

There were many potential benefits. Digital technology is far more efficient than analog, so broadcasters could squeeze more channels into the same space. Pictures would be sharper; colors, brighter.

But there was an even bigger motivating factor: money.

The Bush White House, with the support of many Republicans, was pushing for tax cuts for wealthy Americans. They hoped to find a way to make up for the deficit of funds the U.S. Treasury would receive. The administration was also interested in finding new sources of revenue to help reduce the USA's growing deficit.

The solution: a spectrum auction.

By selling airwaves that had been given to broadcasters — free of charge — decades earlier, lawmakers figured they could raise $10 billion, at least. The spectrum could penetrate walls and other obstacles, making it ideal for wireless broadband and public safety communications.

Many Democrats, including Markey, supported the auction plan, but they also had concerns. The transition, they pointed out, would idle as many as 70 million analog TVs. Democrats said it was only fair for the government to make sure the switch was cost-free for affected consumers.

Ultimately, the DTV bill passed with bipartisan support. It was signed into law by then-president Bush in early 2006.

NTIA, which oversees U.S. spectrum usage, was directed to implement the coupon program. Its budget: $1.5 billion, including $1.34 billion for the coupon program. That was far less than the $4 billion Democrats had requested but a lot more than the $400 million Republicans had initially proposed.

America's TV spectrum hit the auction block a year later, in January 2007. The sale raised $20 billion, about double what many had expected. The money was earmarked for a range of government uses, including $7.2 billion for deficit reduction.

According to two former officials who would not speak for attribution, NTIA's decision-making during this period was based primarily on two factors: the DTV switch date — Feb. 17, 2009 — and the coupon program's budget.

Many decisions boiled down to: "What money do we have, and how far can we make the money stretch?" one of the former officials recalls.

Against that backdrop, the agency made a number of pivotal decisions:

•Expiration rules. The DTV bill requires that coupons expire after 90 days. The bill is silent, however, about whether a household may reapply once coupons expire.

NTIA took the position that households could not reapply. After 90 days, expired coupons were reissued to other consumers. The agency's policy had the effect, over time, of limiting the number of people who could use coupons, Kimmelman says. One of the former NTIA officials says the decision was influenced by funding limitations.

•Definition of "households." The DTV bill states that each U.S. household may apply for up to two coupons, but does not define the word. As a result, NTIA was free to use its own discretion.

NTIA decided to use the U.S. Census definition — a single, residential dwelling where one family lives, with no shared dining or living facilities. The agency's decision eliminated broad swaths of America, including nursing homes, drug-rehab centers and residential hotels. People living in unconventional arrangements — such as ministers who maintain living quarters in their churches — were also out.

•P.O. boxes. Though the DTV bill is silent on this issue, NTIA decided that people who only used P.O. boxes, with no fixed address, weren't eligible for coupons. (Native American reservations were the exception.)

The former NTIA officials say this decision was driven, primarily, by concerns about fraud, which could have drained funds. The agency considered setting up a system for verifying the authenticity of P.O. boxes but decided that would have been time-consuming and expensive.

•Bulk mail. In the DTV bill, Congress instructed the agency to use the U.S Postal Service, but left the details up to NTIA. The agency decided to use bulk mail, which is far cheaper than first class but slower. Mail traveling first class arrives in days; bulk mail can take weeks.

The bulk-mail decision came under harsh criticism in late December, when NTIA ran out of funds and coupon requests started piling up.

Even with all those limitations, however, consumers continued to clamor for the government's $40 coupons.

When the FCC conducted a citywide test of DTV in Wilmington, N.C., in the fall, NTIA received requests for almost 76,000 coupons — five times the number of over-the-air TV households that Nielsen said existed there. Part of that was due to the efforts of the FCC, which had blanketed the local market with public service ads leading up to the test.

According to one former government official, NTIA became concerned that the surge in media attention would result in artificially high coupon requests. For that reason, the same person says, NTIA groused when the FCC made plans to put a DTV clip-and-mail coupon request in AARP The Magazine, circulation 25 million.

The FCC placed the ad anyway.

Defending the NTIA.

The NTIA's Baker, who has since left the agency, declined multiple requests for an interview. She did send an e-mail to USA TODAY shortly after her resignation: "NTIA effectively and efficiently administered the program that Congress designed," she wrote.

However, in an interview with Communications Daily, a Washington-based trade publication, Baker had plenty to say. She blamed NTIA's penny-pinching ways, in part, on the White House's Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for making sure federal programs adhere to their budgets.

In the interview, published Feb. 5, Baker makes it clear that money was a constant concern. NTIA "ran a very strict program because Congress gave us a very tight legislative package," she says. She cites the bulk-mail decision as an example of the agency "being sensitive to cost."

Said Baker, "We really tried to make this a bipartisan effort for everyone to know what we were doing, exactly what the numbers were, because it was Congress' program, and Congress was going to have to make changes if changes were to be made."

Baker's comments stand in contrast to NTIA's report to Congress last fall. In the Nov. 6 report, submitted on Baker's watch, the agency assured Congress that it had "sufficient funds" to meet its coupon obligations and could possibly "return as much as $340 million to the U.S. Treasury."

In the report, NTIA allowed that there were also "less optimal but possible" scenarios: that consumer demand could surge significantly, causing NTIA to exhaust its funds.

In that unlikely event, the agency noted, "NTIA will notify the Congress and address the matter as quickly as possible."

How many TVs?

NTIA, remarkably, never had a hard fix on how many TVs might be affected. When the DTV bill was passed, estimates varied widely, from a low of 20 million to more than 70 million. Republicans, who wanted to spend as little as possible on DTV, tended to embrace the smaller estimate; Democrats favored the higher one.

NTIA decided to do a little sleuthing on its own.

Since cable and satellite customers wouldn't be affected by the switch, NTIA figured they wouldn't request coupons in large numbers, one of the former officials recalls.

NTIA soon hatched a plan: It would ask cable and satellite TV companies to provide numbers of subscribers, by market, to the government. The agency planned to cross-reference those lists with U.S. population maps to come up with a guesstimate of the number and location of free-TV households.

The response from cable and satellite?

"They turned us down flat," the same source says. "They told us they considered that information to be confidential."

In the end, NTIA's predictions about coupon demand were based not on anticipated demand but on simple arithmetic. The agency took its $1.34 billion budget and divided it by $40, the face value of coupons. Total: 33.5 million.

That figure — 33.5 million — became NTIA's coupon cap. In reports to Congress, the agency said demand could ratchet as high as 50 million by the time the program shut down. To pay for the difference, the agency was counting on millions of people allowing their coupons to expire unused.

NTIA was silent about what happened to all the people who inadvertently allowed their coupons to expire. But the reality was this: They were flat out of luck.

On track for June?

What's the lesson here? Kimmelman says the DTV program underscores the folly of any government trying to bring about major cultural and societal shifts on the cheap.

"Programs designed to help people that are run by people whose only interest is minimizing cost are doomed to fail," he says.

The good news: "We now have an administration that wants this program to be successful," says Markey, the current chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. As a result, he says, "I think we will finally have a successful transition" to digital TV on June 12.

As for NTIA, at the request of lawmakers, it is now sending out coupons via first-class mail. Congress has also directed the agency to allow households whose coupons have expired to reapply.

NTIA began processing those requests on Monday.


100s of analog signals are severed

Analog broadcasting signals will cease for some

Bunglers of the spectrum

DTV officially postponed

More on DTV...Kansas City style

Done deal...analog broadcasting switch on hold

Jacques Steinberg's esaay on DTV switch

The House negates digital delay

Digital TV switchover is postponed

Junk televisions and recycling

Bunglers of the spectrum

The following article sums up the debacle.

"How We Bungled the Digital Television Transition"

by

Eliot Van Buskirk

February 20th, 2009

Wired

America's transition to over-the-air digital television signals, which netted the government $19 billion in a wireless spectrum auction, was doomed from the start, thanks to a flawed voucher program and a time frame that left the country stranded between administrations.

In January, close to two million people were stuck on the waiting list for $40 coupons that only cover part of the cost of a digital television converter. The converters make new over-the-air digital signals watchable on analog televisions, expire after ninety days, and originally could not be sent to anyone with a P.O. box or nursing home address.

Recently sworn-in President Barack Obama urged Congress to delay the digital television transition originally scheduled for February 17 until June 12, and Congress complied, costing taxpayers another $650 million as part of the stimulus bill, which will be spent on staffing FCC call centers and outreach programs to help Americans weather a transition most were prepared for.

"It's hard not to be cynical about this, but if you look at the glacial pace with which the federal government has moved in all things concerning the transition, we were immediately concerned as soon as it was clear that the coupon program was unable to process coupons," said Joel Kelsey of the Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports. "The largest problem with the transition, and the best argument for delay, was that the coupon program failed consumers when they needed it most."

This failed voucher program, which will cost taxpayers $1.99 billion instead of $1.34 billion, could not keep up with demand. Awareness was not the issue. Traffic to the DTV transition website peaked during the week ending January 3, according to Hitwise. And although the FCC hired an extra 4,265 people to field calls to 1-888-CALL-FCC, only 25,000 people called those centers on February 18, when 421 television stations stopped broadcasting analog signals, according to the National Association of Broadcasters.

"These findings from local stations, coupled with the FCC data, paint the picture that by and large TV households affected in those markets were ready," stated NAB digital television transition vice president Jonathan Collegio. "A relatively small percentage of viewers so far have needed assistance."

People knew about the February 17th date because local stations had been alerting them to that fact for about a year, as required.

"There's no way to quantify the time and the cost of the [messaging] crawls [across the bottom of the screen]," said Dean Ditmer, station manager of WKEF in Dayton, Ohio, whose application to cease analog transmission on February 17 as planned was denied. "It's in the probably billions of dollars across the country in terms of what an advertiser would have had to pay."

"No one can afford that kind of advertising."

Indeed.

Among the extra $650 million dollars the delay will cost taxpayers, there's no allowance for stations that have to pay an average of $40,000 to keep broadcasting in analog, or for companies that paid $19 billion for spectrum they were supposed to get four months earlier.

Plus, the $40 vouchers only cover about two thirds of the cost of a converter box: $60-$80 at big box retail stores or $40-$80 plus shipping and handling online. Considering that the government made $19 billion auctioning public spectrum to private companies, many wonder why the voucher program was not managed properly.

"Millions of people across America would lose access to essential news and information, and the federal government, that mandated this transition, was asking them to pay for something they once got for free," said Kelsey. "Meanwhile, they and businesses across the nation were making money, making profit off of this transition. This is something that consumers didn't ask for, but they are being asked to pay for it."

After three years of preparation, $1.34 billion in government spending, plus another billion or so in free advertising from local stations, diligent consumers who were trying to get the coupons six weeks before the February 17th transition date could not receive these insufficient $40 vouchers, and an estimated seven million Americans were still unprepared for digital television, due to sloppy oversight.

After the DTV Delay Act was signed, 421 local television stations (Excel) applied to the FCC to stick with the original February date, approximately 75 percent of those applications were approved. The remaining 25 percent were denied because the FCC insists that at least one major network affiliate in each local area keep broadcasting local news and emergency information, while others broadcast a "nightlight" video informing holdouts about the transition, during the four months leading up to the new June 12 date.

Which brings us back to the failed voucher program -- the main reason for the delay. Why didn't the NTIA make the voucher cover the whole cost of a converter box? "That's a fantastic question," said Kelsey. "Or why didn't they just put out a request for proposals to manufacturers, and give everyone a converter box."

Making matters worse, the 2005 act set the original transition date for February 2009 -- precisely when the FCC and other governmental agencies change hands -- making a quick reaction to the crisis all but impossible.

"In the midst of it, the administration, rightly, was coming in and saying, 'Look, we're going to have to deal with this giant transition that we've been handed in the first twenty days of our administration, and we're looking at potentially tens of millions of people losing access to their television and emergency news and information, and that's not a situation we want to find ourselves in,'" said Kelsey.

This additional factor added to the need for this expensive delay. "Why the hell – excuse me – why in 2005 did they decide February 17th was a good time for this transition?"


100s of analog signals are severed

Analog broadcasting signals will cease for some

DTV officially postponed

More on DTV...Kansas City style

Done deal...analog broadcasting switch on hold

Jacques Steinberg's esaay on DTV switch

The House negates digital delay

Digital TV switchover is postponed

Junk televisions and recycling