Digital TV Broadcasting? Not Quite Yet

Responding to President Barack Obama’s request for a delay in the deadline for America’s transition to digital television, the United States Senate voted unanimously in favor of postponing the cut-off date for analog TV transmission from February 17 to June 12, 2009. The “DTV transition” or “broadcast digital transition” in the U.S. involves the switchover from traditional analog TV broadcasting to exclusively digital broadcasting of free over-the-air television programming.

 

A number of factors led Obama to begin pressing for the delay early in January 2009. The Nielsen Co. estimated that more than 6.5 million U.S. households had not yet received their analog-to-digital “converter box” for over-the-air broadcast signals. (Under the Digital Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005, there was established a federally-sponsored DTV Converter Box Coupon Program. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration runs the program, and 3 million consumers are on the waiting list for coupons.) Thus, their TVs, unprepared for digital broadcasts, would become inoperable on February 17. Moreover, the federal program that doles out coupons to help pay for the cost of these converter boxes reached its $1.34 billion funding limit. And Jonathan Collegio, Vice President for the Digital Television Transition for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), told the Associated Press that the Nielsen numbers may actually overstate the number of viewers not equipped for digital broadcasts.

 

Many of these unprepared TV households are occupied by poor, elderly or rural folk.

 

Some Republicans argued against the postponement, saying that consumers would be confused and broadcasters ready to “go digital” would be inclined to continue analog broadcasting along with digital, at great expense (PBS estimates it will cost about $22 million for public broadcasting stations).

 

There’s also the argument that various wireless service providers, government and public safety organizations are waiting for those sections of the electromagnetic spectrum that will be reallocated, thanks to the digital transition. For example, channels 52 through 69 (the lower half of the 700 MHz band) will be reallocated for other traffic, thus completing a reallocation process that had begun in the late 1990s. The channels had been auctioned off in early 2008 for about $20 billion, with the winning bidders to take possession of them in February 2009. Four channels from this portion of the broadcast spectrum (60, 61, 68, and 69) will be held for reallocation to public safety communications (such as police, fire, and emergency rescue).

 

Also, some newly-available frequencies will now be occupied by advanced commercial wireless services for consumers, such as Qualcomm's (News - Alert) intended use of former UHF channel 55 (716-722 MHz) for its MediaFLO (Media Forward Link Only) service, a competitor to the Korean T-DMB, the Japanese 1seg and the European DVB-H standards, that transmits real-time audio and video streams, individual, non-realtime video and audio "clips", as well as IP Datacast application data such as stock market quotes, sports scores, and weather reports to portable devices such as cell phones and PDAs. Qualcomm CEO Len Lauer (News - Alert) is against a delay, since it would cost his company tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue.

 

Verizon hopes to use their portion of the auctioned spectrum to roll out next-generation broadband wireless in the form of Long-Term Evolution (LTE (News - Alert)), the successor to GSM and EDGE.

 

The bill’s author, Democratic Senate commerce committee chairman Jay Rockefeller, says that broadcast stations can switch to digital prior to the June deadline if they like, pending FCC (News - Alert) approval.

 

The Senate's bill will now go the House of Representatives, where it is expected to pass.

 

In Canada, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has said that Canada's transition from analog to digital broadcasting will be completed by August 31, 2011.