Stateside with Rosalea: Ditch-it-all TV

Every day for the past several months, local TV stations have been counting down the days until February 17, when analog signals will be switched off in the USA. That’s because, if you have an analog TV set and no cable or satellite provider, you need to buy a weather station in order to receive and see the digital signals on your analog TV.

I use the term “weather station” advisedly. I’ve had a digital converter box for more than a year—two of them, in fact. The first one was a “gift” for donating money to a local public service broadcaster; I bought the second one for $6 plus a $40 coupon that the government provided to help people switch, thinking that the first one was a case of “you get what you pay for”.

If there’s heavy fog in San Francisco, I can’t get channels 2 and 4. If it’s really windy, I can only get channel 60 without such severe pixelation that I think I’m being invaded by Santa’s helpers. And certain storm patterns approaching the Bay Area from out in the Pacific disrupt all 35 channels I can receive on a good day. “Better hunt out a really sturdy umbrella and a rain cape,” I think, as I try to catch a glimpse of the morning news before leaving for work.

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The photo above shows you where I get most of my TV signals from. It’s taken from the Marin Headlands looking south towards San Francisco. On the right is the Pacific Ocean; I live over to the left across San Francisco Bay in Oakland—about 12 miles as the seagull flies. I’m on a hill with no tall buildings around me that would disrupt the signals, which come from that faint spindly-looking object smack-dab in the center of the photograph—Sutro Tower.

The first indication that something was seriously wrong with the digital television transition—six years and millions of dollars in the making—was very late on Christmas Eve day, when the FCC issued documentation about the special “nightlight” provision it was having to make for stations that couldn’t meet the deadline. They would be allowed to continue analog broadcasts past the deadline.

The two nightlight stations in the Bay Area are channels 2 and 4—neither of them affiliates to the major broadcasters, although KTVU2 carries a lot of Fox programming, and KRON4 often uses CNN news reports. The latter used to be the NBC affiliate, but it’s now owned by a relative small fry in the broadcasting business. In fact, KRON switched off its digital signal altogether on January 5—supposedly until February 18—so that it can do the necessary engineering work to increase signal power.

Then came word that the Obama administration wanted to extend the date for the change until June because the coupon program had long since run out of money and 65 million households with only analog televisions would have the plug pulled on them on February 17. A bill to extend the deadline and appropriate more money for the coupon program passed the Senate on Friday but was defeated in the House this evening, Wednesday. A different House bill calls for simply pumping money into the coupon program without changing the date of the transition.

Rural areas will probably be the hardest hit by the digital transition as they’re poorly served by transmitters. The companies and public safety organizations that are supposed to get the freed-up analog spectrum after the transition will be hardest hit by any extension of the deadline for the change. The big winners, of course, are cable and satellite providers, which have been advertising special rates to new subscribers, for which millions of households will have to sign up if they want to continue watching television.

The irony—if that is the right word—of this is that cable and satellite providers don’t come under the purview of the Federal Communications Commission rules about broadcasting content standards. In effect, the FCC is taking itself out of the picture by taking away the picture.

And so it will be that yet another asset that belongs to the citizens of the United States—free-to-air television—will slip from their control in order that their pockets can be milked by companies represented by some of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington DC.

As if that weren’t enough, the public access channels which cable is required to carry in exchange for being free of FCC fetters are being severely limited because those cable companies are no longer providing free studios and equipment, telling local authorities that they’ll have to bear that cost themselves, exposing the local access programs to censorship at a local level. And television production and distribution companies are also being squeezed by cable and satellite providers’ demands for higher rates to carry their content.

Resources: Two good industry sources for stories relating to this are www.broadcastingcable.com and www.multichannel.com. For daily roundups of news concerning these issues, including the upcoming use of the analog spectrum by companies in the broadband industry, subscribe to Free Press’s media reform news service at www.freepress.net/newsroom.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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