OTTAWA – Canadian regulators should think long and hard before setting a digital OTA television transition deadline as has been done in the States, says Canadian Association of Broadcasters president and CEO Glenn O’Farrell.
O’Farrell was responding to a story in Cartt.ca on Monday which quoted Industry Canada’s assistant deputy minister Michael Binder as saying such a deadline should he set in Canada.
The American analog shut off date of February 17, 2009 is thought of by many down south as set in stone, but Federal Communications Commission commissioner Michael Copps, just last week at the National Association of Broadcasters annual convention in Las Vegas said he worries about how many consumers are going to be left behind on transition day.
(The OTA DTV transition is not only about high definition TV, but also about new, multiplexed content delivered in the main station stream.)
"One has to be careful about setting timelines the way that we saw the U.S. FCC set deadlines," O’Farrell told Cartt.ca on Wednesday. "Deadlines can be a good thing because they can provide a motivating force but other times, they don’t necessarily produce the outcomes that we expected and we have to figure out transitional situations."
One of those transitional situations Stateside is that congress has set aside over US$1 billion help pay for cheap set top boxes that are not yet available to consumers – and the deadline is less than two years away.
Taking into account the U.S. deadline, said O’Farrell, "They’re concerned about it there so we want to be mindful of that before we set our own deadline – if there is any appetite for doing that.
"I think it’s better to allow the marketplace to continue its incontrovertible migration towards (digital)."
Stay tuned on this one.
– Greg O’Brien
