Did FCC Blow Up Cable’s Public TV Deal?
Digital-TV Carriage Agreement With Hundreds of Public Stations in Jeopardy
By Ted Hearn -- Multichannel News, 9/14/2007 11:21:00 AM
Washington — The Federal Communications Commission may have just blown up cable’s 2005 digital-TV carriage agreement with hundreds of public TV stations.
Without any government intervention, cable operators agreed to carry as many as four digital programming services from each local public station after all TV broadcasts went digital.
But there was one element missing from the agreement: Any mention of delivering an analog signal to TV viewers after the transition.
That absence conflicts with the unanimous FCC vote Tuesday night regarding cable systems’ carriage of must-carry TV stations after Feb. 17, 2009. That is the official cutoff date for all analog broadcasts.
All 386 full-power public TV stations have mandatory cable carriage rights. And in its new ruling, the FCC said all cable systems that have not gone all-digital by Feb. 17, 2009 are required to transmit in analog and digital all must-carry stations until Feb. 17, 2012.
FCC chairman Kevin Martin said the dual-carriage rules were necessary to protect analog-only cable subscribers from possibly losing access to digital must-carry signals.
Cable operators will have to convert digital signals to analog signals to satisfy the requirement, unless they provide digital converter boxes to all customers. The cable-public station deal contemplated no such analog delivery requirement.
The 2005 agreement was reached between the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the Association of Public Television Stations, and the Public Broadcasting Service. FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, a Democrat, spoke at a press conference to bless the deal.
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The FCC largely embraced the voluntary three-year dual carriage plan proposed by NCTA in recent weeks. NCTA’s plan, in a little-noted condition, did not include public TV stations because of the 2005 agreement.
An FCC spokeswoman said she was not prepared to address the issue.
APTS communications manager Tania Panczyk-Collins said the organization would not comment. She also declined to confirm details in the 2005 joint press release.
NCTA vice president of communications Brian Dietz declined to discuss the substance of the carriage agreement and the impact of the FCC’s new rules, which NCTA is not planning to appeal in court.
“NCTA has an agreement with APTS and PBS that governs the carriage of public-TV stations during and after the transition,” Dietz said.
It’s possible that cable operators might have to comply with both the agreement and the new FCC’s rules, which would mean public stations would get multicast must carry and analog carriage.
It’s just as possible that if the public stations are forced to rely just on the FCC’s rules, they would get analog carriage and carriage of just one digital service, losing multicast carriage contained in the cable deal.
The cable-public TV agreement was unveiled when the law fixed the DTV transition at a point in time when 85% of households in a local television market had digital reception equipment.
About a year later, President Bush signed into law the Feb. 17, 2009 hard date, which imposed an analog broadcast TV cutoff nationally, regardless of the penetration of digital TVs and set-top boxes.
