Senate Staffers to Get DTV Briefing

Will Cover Same Territory as FCC Presentation

by John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 5/13/2009 6:05:03 PM

WASHINGTON —

The Senate Commerce Committee will get its own digital-TV transition update.

According to sources on and off the Hill, staffers on both the Republican and Democratic side will get an update on the status of the similar to one provided the FCC at its public meeting Wednesday.

That will include a slide show by National Telecommunications and Information Administration coupon-box program administrator Bernadette McGuire-Rivera. Currently, there is enough money in the program to send out coupons to everyone who asks for them, according to the agency, and if it looked like there might not be, the agency is prepared to prioritize coupons for the 3.3 million households Nielsen Media Research has said are unready for the transition.

The Hill update is scheduled for Thursday morning at 9:30 a.m.

The FCC said Wednesday that a total of 927 stations will be pulling the plug on analog June 12, and conceded that despite their best efforts to educate analog-only households, some screens will go dark.

The Senate Commerce briefing makes sense since it was Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and ranking member Kay Bailey Hutchison who hammered out a compromise bill that moved the date from Feb. 17 to June 12. That move was in large part to insure that the NTIA would have enough money and time to clear out a backlog of converter-box coupon requests, which it has since done.