Transmission gridlock
Jan 1, 2007 12:00 PM, BY CRAIG BIRKMAIER
Will the information superhighway become a toll road?
There is a school of thought that suggests that it is in the best interest of the electorate to vote for a divided government. That is, to elect the president from one party and Congress from the other. And that's just what has happened in the United States as a result of the midterm elections this past November.
The popularity of YouTube represents a shift in viewer interest to online media and entertainment. Broadcasters fi nally took notice this year and have made major pushes to place more content including full-length show episodes online.
From time to time, this column takes a look at the techno-political landscape of the U.S. Capitol, seeking to learn and predict where the latest political winds may blow the broadcast industry. As U.S. broadcasters now rely on their competitors to reach the vast majority of their audience, these periodic glimpses at the legislative and regulatory inner workings of our business must include the gamut of related telecommunications businesses that compete with some of which also enable the continued existence of free over-the-air television.
As a starting point, it is important to observe that the NTSC transmitters are still pumping out megawatts of analog broadcasts to U.S. homes tuning in with rabbit ears. Jan. 1, 2007 the date set by the FCC in 1997 for NTSC shutdown has come and gone, and only a tiny percentage of U.S. homes are now watching the new ATSC broadcast service.
Looking back at the efforts of the previous Congress, it is fair to say it passed one piece of legislation that will have a significant effect on broadcasters. That legislation set a new date of Feb. 17, 2009, for the shutdown of the NTSC service. Some people question whether the politicians will stick to the deadline this time.
Here's my prediction of what the current Congress will do regarding broadcasters: The 2009 deadline date will not be changed. However, the Democrat-controlled Congress may throw more money into the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA)-administered program to provide coupons that subsidize the purchase of ATSC set-top receivers for those who want to continue using their old NTSC receivers. That's it.
For the next two years, Congress will be operating in gridlock, much as it did for the past two years. Attention is likely to shift to the FCC. For broadcasters, ownership caps and spectrum sharing (i.e. the white space debate) will be the hot topics this year.
To be honest, the politicians have little choice but to move on to more important issues. They need the revenues that will be produced from auctions of the spectrum that broadcasters will be returning in 2009.
Attempts to create national franchise agreements that would allow the telcos to enter the multichannel TV business without gaining local franchise approval likely died with the previous Congress. And it is unlikely that network neutrality legislation will get through the current Congress because of gridlock in the Senate.
But network neutrality is likely to be the subject of considerable debate over the next two years. At stake is the ability of one set of gatekeepers to turn the information superhighway into a toll road, not unlike what has happened to free television, thanks to the content conglomerates that now control television content creation and distribution.
Significant milestones
At a global level, several significant milestones were passed in 2006. The Netherlands became the first nation to turn off its analog transmitters. This is not surprising given the fact that 95 percent of homes in the Netherlands subscribe to cable, and it has one of the highest rates of broadband penetration in the world. It's worth noting that the United States has slipped to 13th in the world in the rate of broadband penetration, an area that is drawing considerable interest from Congress.
Another big change last year was new display technologies overtaking the venerable CRT display in unit sales. HDTV-capable displays were one of the top product categories for Christmas sales in the United States. This is due in part to significant price drops for LCD and plasma panels.
Many of those new displays now offer 1080-line progressive scanning. Virtually all of the new display technologies can be used to view traditional television content and new forms of square pixel digital content from the world of computing and the Internet.
In 2006, YouTube became a phenomenon, and the ability to share user-generated video content finally caught the attention of the media conglomerates. Late in the year, Internet powerhouse Google acquired YouTube.
Using the Internet to download entertainment content is likely to gain steam in 2007, with major pushes by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. This, in turn, is fueling the network neutrality debate.
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