WASHINGTON – If Canadian broadcasters are still wondering about an absolute deadline for digital/high definition conversion, National Association of Broadcasters CEO Edward Fritts set one yesterday.
In a presentation before the Senate Commerce Committee, Fritts said that his members have come to grips with the fact Congress will set a deadline for digital television conversion of some time in 2009 when government will then reclaim the analog spectrum from the broadcasters.
“Broadcasters accept that Congress will implement a 2009 hard date for the end of analog broadcasts,” Fritts told the committee.
“And we’re ready. We’ve done our part, investing billions to put up the more than 1,500 local stations that are on-air in digital now.”
What does this mean for Canadian broadcasters, which have moved far more slowly into HD? Time to hurry up, says Canadian Digital Television’s Michael McEwen. “I think the Canadian system is going to have to work towards that date,” he told www.cartt.ca in an interview this afternoon. “Now, do we have to be exactly 2009? Probably not. We’re somewhat protected here under regulations, but we can’t be any more than a year to 18 months behind… We’ve got four years so we should be able to handle it.”
However, the remaining battle Stateside is whether or not to force cable operators to carry the new digital signal or signals and also downconvert to analog for consumers who do not have or can not afford a new digital television.
“For instance, after the transition, in 2009, if you are a cable subscriber with both analog and digital sets in your house, you will want your analog sets to work in analog … and your digital sets to work in digital,” said Fritts.
“Consumers should be empowered to make the choice about which signal to receive, not the cable gatekeeper.
In Canada, making digital television available to those who can’t afford it is an important bit of public policy that has to be addressed, added McEwen. CDTV, he said, is beginning to look at the issue and is discussing items such as tax incentives for broadcast infrastructure build-out to small communities, some form of set top box subsidy for low income households, or striking a deal with satellite and cable so that low income rural-dwellers get access to digital in places where it’s not economical to put in a digital transmitter.
“We’ve got some policy options in front of us. We have to debate them out and then come forward with a basket of potential incentives that we could partner with government to make them happen.”
U.S. reports suggest that government may end up handing out set top boxes to low-income viewers so that their TVs aren’t suddenly useless, come 2009.
The U.S. cable companies, for their part, wants government to stay out of it altogether and said they’d gladly downconvert digital signals to analog – for a price. “Our solution is to provide cable operators the flexibility, once the analog spectrum has been returned, to ‘down-convert’ the digital signals from must carry broadcasters at the cable headend,” National Cable & Telecommunications Association CEO Kyle McSlarrow told the same committee.
“What this means, as a practical matter, is that the over 40 million cable customers who can only receive an analog service will not lose access to must carry stations, and will enjoy the same service the day after the transition that they received the day before. It means that many stations – including public television stations, network affiliates, and other stations that have negotiated retransmission consent agreements (emphasis added) with the cable industry – would be carried in digital as well, just as they are today.”
But this isn’t just about carrying HD and analog. Some American broadcasters are using the digital spectrum to provide multicast over-the-air streams to consumers right now. But so far, U.S. cable companies have resisted carrying those multicasts, leaving the broadcasters to deliver them to antennas only.
“Multi-casting also means greater opportunities to serve diverse demographics,” added Fritts. “Ninety stations nationwide are multi-casting foreign language programming. The languages range widely from German, to Korean, to Spanish, to Vietnamese. Most important – from the consumers’ standpoint – these services are free.
“Regrettably, in many cases, cable operators refuse to provide these services to their subscribers. If cable monopolies strip these free services from broadcasters’ signals, it will be difficult for stations to fully develop multi-casting,” Fritts continued.
“Let’s be clear: the multi-cast issue is not about capacity,” he added, addressing cable’s most common complaint. “Regardless of whether they multi-cast … or do a single stream of HDTV programming … a broadcaster’s digital signal takes up no more bandwidth on the cable system. In fact, with new compression technologies, whether a station multi-casts or not, they will occupy one-half of the cable bandwidth they took up in the analog world. The cable system will get back the rest,” he concluded.
Uh, not so fast, said McSlarrow’s presentation. “The broadcasters’ attempts to appropriate additional channel capacity on cable systems through dual and multicast must carry will harm consumers by slowing the deployment of broadband and a host of other new digital services,” he said. “The reason is simple: these services – such as 100+ megabits per second Internet access, VoIP telephone service, and digital programming tiers – all compete for a finite amount of space on cable systems.”
While the CRTC has said that Canadian cable operators must carry both the HD and analog streams of broadcasters until further notice, it has not made a determination on multicast streams, saying it will look at them on a case-by-case basis, meaning broadcasters would have to apply for a multicast license. Click here, and go to paragraph 73.
The U.S. Senate Committee hearings are leading up to a bill which is to be presented by year’s end.
– Greg O’Brien
