House Passes Bill Pushing DTV Transition Date To June 12
Obama Administration Praises Passage
By John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 2/4/2009 9:38:00 PM MT
After heated debate by legislators Wednesday, and some 18 months of broadcasters, cable operators and the government drilling the Feb. 17 "hard" date into the hearts and minds of viewers, the House voted Wednesday to push the cut-off date for analog TV from Feb. 17 to June 12.
The vote was 264 to 158, with more Republicans voting for the delay (23) than there were Democrats (10) going against the Obama administration and party leadership to vote against it.
The vote was a victory for the new Obama administration, which pushed for the date change and got little push back from a broadcasting industry not looking "to be the skunk at the new president's garden party," as one Republican put it.
The bill allows households with expired coupons to reapply for them.
"The passage of this bipartisan legislation means that millions of Americans will have the time they need to prepare for the conversion," White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said. "We will continue to work with Congress to improve the information and assistance available to American consumers in advance of June 12, especially those in the most vulnerable communities."
Republicans complained that the bill had received no markup, no hearing, and was essentially being railroaded through unnecessarily. Democrats countered that there had been nine hearings on the DTV transition in general and that it was a finite, one-time delay that was necessary to reduce the number of TVs that would go dark and viewers, particularly senior, lower-income and rural viewers, who would be affected by the government's failure to sufficiently plan, coordinate and fund the program.
Democrats also pointed out that the date change had the support of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Verizon, AT&T, and a number of public-safety organizations.
Behind the push for the change was an accounting problem that caused the National Telecommunications & Information Administration earlier this month to start putting requests for DTV-to-analog converter box coupons on a waiting list and slowed the distribution of the coupons to a trickle.
That list had topped 2 million households by press time, Democrats pointed out, and had grown by 200,000 households in the past two days, according to top Democrats who had pushed to change the date.
The $40 coupons are a government subsidy to help analog-only viewers pay for a converter box that allows them to still get a TV signal after the change to digital.
House Republicans had argued the date change was unnecessary, and had offered their own bill, then tried to amend the Democrats' bill, to free up money for the coupons and leave the date where it was.
It will now be up to broadcasters to decide when to make the switch between now and June 12, since the bill allows them to move early so long as they clear it with the FCC.
The FCC said Tuesday that more than 1,000 stations would still be able to turn off their analog signals before June 12 if they choose to.
Some stations have already indicated they are sticking with the Feb. 17 date. The FCC said it had heard from 276 stations to that effect, in addition to 143 stations that had already pulled the plug, and another 60 that said they planned to do so before Feb. 17. The FCC had pointed out that some of those 276 may change their minds once the date changed.
Joe Barton (R-Tex.), who has led the opposition to the bill in the House, suggested that the bill was unnecessary because, according to acting FCC chairman Michael Copps, some 61% of TV stations were going to make the transition before June 12 anyway.
He was referring to a letter Copps sent Barton in response to a query about how many stations could move early. But in that letter, Copps simply identified how many stations (61% or about 1,800) could make the transition early without interfering with other stations, not how many would choose to do so.
But some clearly are going ahead with the move. In fact, a larger number of stations than previously anticipated are likely to terminate their analog operations on the original date of Feb. 17, according to Ardell Hill, senior vice president of broadcast operations for Media General. Maintaining analog service for the Media General group costs $150,000 in electricity alone.
"That's just raw electric, to keep analog running," says Hill. "In today's environment, that's a lot of money."
So Media General plans to turn off early in several markets, mainly ones where all the stations are already on their final DTV channel assignment.
"We've got six that are a no-brainer," says Hill. "We're on at full-power now, and on our final channel."
One legislator during the debate estimated that across the country, the additional cost could be on the order of $141 million.
It will also be up to the FCC to quickly come up with rules to implement the new law, including whether an FCC requirement that stations must give viewers at least 30 days notice before pulling the plug on analog still applies.
An FCC source says that the commission has already been working on that implementation language just in case.
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Apparently in the mind of our government the term 'hard date' is meaningless - unless of course...
Quigley Spargus - 2009-5-2 11:05:26
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