Through the Wire

Shatner Friendship Means Plenty to Horn

Viewers with digital video recorders and very sharp eyes might have caught a cable-industry interloper in the gallery witnessing the trial of character Allen Shore (James Spader) on the ABC drama Boston Legal May 2.

If he had spoken, you might have had a better chance of recognizing him. The court watcher was Mike Horn, CEO of Cable Radio Network. Horn’s voice is heard on millions of cable systems, providing the audio entertainment programming over the local public-information channel.

He also records on-hold messages for many systems, so he’s the guy trying to sell you new products as you wait for a representative to pick up the call.

Horn got the gig as “atmosphere,” the term given to actors who fill out the background in a scene, due to his long-term friendship with William Shatner, who won an Emmy playing whacko attorney Denny Crane in the series. Horn got to feign interest in the episode as Crane defended Shore on charges he advised a felony suspect to flee.

Horn did not offer a review of the scene where Crane dropped his drawers to demonstrate to the jury how his client had a “target on his behind,” placed there by the prosecution.

Stevens Bill 'Only’ Has One Grammar Problem

In telecommunications legislation proposed May 1 by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), an analog TV set built or shipped in the United States would need a warning label stating that the unit requires a digital-to-analog converter to receive local TV signals after the termination of analog TV on Feb. 17, 2009.

The analog shutdown has the potential to orphan about 73 million analog TV sets not currently connected to a pay TV service, according to the National Association of Broadcasters. For months, Stevens has complained that retailers continue to sell millions of analog TV sets without any warning about the impact of the digital transition on consumers that rely exclusively on free, over-the-air broadcasting.

In his bill, Stevens mandated that the label’s instructions must be written in English and Spanish. The bill included the text of the English version but failed to furnish a Spanish translation.

Here is the English text:

'CONSUMER ALERT

'This TV only has an “analog” broadcast turner and will require a converter box after February 17, 2009 to receive over-the-air broadcasts with an antenna because of the Nation’s transition to digital broadcasting on that date as required by Federal law. It should continue to work as before with cable and satellite TV services, gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD players and similar products.’

April Acton, who has taught middle school English in Gladbrook, Iowa, for nearly three decades, confirmed our suspicion that the warning label is fatally flawed because it included a grammatical error — namely, the placement of the word “only” in the first sentence.

“The word only is an adverb and it needs to be placed as closely as possible to the word it is modifying. In this case, it would be the word analog. Only is not modifying the word has,” said Acton, who runs a grammar advice Internet site (http://aacton.gladbrook.iowapages.org/index.html).

The label’s wording in the Stevens bill, Acton said, could lead to consumer confusion over the range of components inside an analog TV.

If the Stevens bill ultimately provides a Spanish translation, we promise to consult with Acton’s colleagues in the foreign language department at Gladbrook-Reinbeck Middle School.

Don’t Let Pesky Facts Ruin That Good Story

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Consumer Watch” columnist May 1 took issue with the so-called terrestrial loophole in the 1992 Cable Act. Cable operators that own programming networks are required by law to sell them to rivals Dish Network and DirecTV, but not if the programming is fed to affiliates via terrestrial means — thus the phrase “terrestrial loophole.”

In Philadelphia, Comcast withholds its SportsNet Philadelphia channel from satellite, taking advantage of the terrestrial exemption.

Inquirer writer Jeff Gelles, finding Comcast’s program-retention policy anticompetitive, called for the elimination of the terrestrial exemption, regardless of Congressional intent to promote local programming. Congress, Gelles said, was motivated to allow cable exclusivity of terrestrially delivered local content based on objections raised in the early 1990s by fledgling New England Cable News, at the time jointly owned by Continental Cablevision Inc. and Hearst Corp. (Comcast owns the non-Hearst portion today).

“Congress listened, and a loophole was born — the rule that allows Comcast to refuse to share its Philadelphia SportsNet …,” Gelles declared.

If Congress created the terrestrial exemption on behalf of NECN, it picked the wrong cable channel. When the program-access law was adopted, NECN was distributed via satellite, not via fiber or a ground-based microwave system subject to the exemption.

In a jam, NECN sought a waiver from the program access rules from the FCC, which granted it in June 1994 in an order that also happened to deny a similar waiver sought by Time Warner Cable for Court TV.

While the premise of the Inquirer column was contrived, we have no quarrel with its first sentence: “Like it or not, your past can come back to haunt you. But you can also learn from your mistakes.”

CTAM Summit Choice Is Working Weekdays

For the National Show convention, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association planned the meeting to run Sunday through Tuesday, reasoning more executives would come if the show encroached on the weekend and kept employees away from their desks for a shorter time. For the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing summit in Boston (July 17 to 19), it’s all work week: Monday through Wednesday.

CTAM officials polled their members, who said they didn’t want the meeting to conflict with their weekends.

Planners have tapped some primo speakers to provide perspective from outside the industry, including Steven Levitt, co-author of the best-seller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

The meeting will also feature Fred Reichheld, a consumer-service expert and author of The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth.