ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601110135
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: FRANK GREVE KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
TV stations aren't advertising this, but their owners have a plan that could cost you more than $200 billion.
First, they want to phase out their current transmission system and replace it with a more efficient, computer-style digital system. The move, which they hope will help build audiences, has a stunning side effect: It will make obsolete every television now operating in America, including about 9 million bought during the recent holiday season.
Replacing today's 220 million analog TVs with digital sets to receive the new signal will cost viewers $187 billion, according to the National Association of Broadcasters, an industry lobby based in Washington.
In addition, because stations can't send digital and analog signals over the same channel, broadcasters want use of a second channel free for at least 15 years.
This proposed channel gift to broadcasters comes just as their airwave rivals in the cellular telephone and pager industry have paid more than $8 billion for new channels at government auctions.
Were new TV channels to be auctioned, too, their sale might generate $100 billion for the U.S. Treasury, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees broadcasting.
That's not the same as money in your pocket, but $100 billion amounts to a contribution of $383 apiece from every American that could be used for budget-balancing, Medicare, tax relief or other government purposes.
Neither auctions of airwave channels nor picture upgrades are pie-in-the sky ideas. President Clinton's latest budget-balancing plan calls for $13 billion to be wrung somehow from TV-band auctions in the next seven years. The Senate, which banned such auctions in a measure written with the industry's help in 1993, this fall ordered the FCC to reconsider the idea.
At the same time, ABC, NBC and CBS are pressing the FCC to require several hours of air time daily of digital movie-quality, high-definition television (HDTV) to promote the digital transition. Fox and the Public Broadcasting System want to go digital, but want more flexibility when it comes to airing HDTV.
Under any of these options, today's television sets would be rendered obsolete.
``Does the audience want to go on this journey?'' FCC Chairman Reed Hundt asked in a speech last fall to the International Radio and Television Society. ``Should we assume they will welcome the extinction of analog broadcast?''
Almost no one else in Washington is asking those questions, because the industry-driven presumption is yes. And ultimately, the issue is not just media power in Washington; it's what's happening these days as well-connected industries seek new opportunities to exploit public property, whether it's expanded grazing, mineral or timber rights; wetland development rights; or additional free broadcast channels.
In the case of broadcasting, station owners received designated signal channels free under the 1934 Communications Act, basically to keep them from airing signals that interfered with one another. In return, they accepted a public-trust obligation to air local news, give politicians equal treatment and deliver some community-service programs.
Over the years, broadcasters effectively came to own the airwaves: they could sell them with confidence that broadcasting licenses would continue in effect. And, in the eyes of nearly everyone except station owners, they came to take their public-service obligations lightly.
``It's a national scandal,'' groused former FCC Chairman Henry Geller in a recent interview. He said, for example, that broadcasters have claimed to provide educational programming for children via such programs as ``America's Funniest Home Videos,'' ``Biker Mice from Mars'' and ``Yogi Bear.''
And yet the broadcasters' main policy argument for continued free airwave use is that they provide public-service programming and local news that somehow does the nation good. A second reason, but one quite aside from policy, is that shrinking network TV audiences are making it harder for stations to generate advertising revenue.
Part of the solution is the industry-government plan to switch from analog to digital transmission that's faster, crisper and richer in detail.
Digital's superiority is a complicated matter, but it comes down to this: Analog broadcasting conveys sound and images by varying the height and length of the electronic waves your TV receives. Digital broadcasting entails a computer-like transmission of 1s and 0s that can deliver to your TV a lot more information a lot faster.
In demonstrations at least, high-definition TV pictures are of 35mm movie quality. The sound is as good as CDs. And, when HDTV is not being broadcast, digital transmission can be compressed so that station owners can broadcast multiple programs - of conventional, not HDTV, quality - in the airwave space now taken up by a single analog broadcast.
To make the transition to digital, broadcasters want - and currently are likely to get - 6 megahertz of additional channel space free for the duration of the changeover. They have 6 megahertz for each station with their current licenses. Broadcasters want dual signal licenses for 15 years or more. The Clinton administration wants to take back the old analog channels after seven years and auction them off.
Until the switch is complete, viewers would see HDTV for major sporting and entertainment events, according to the broadcasters' plan. The rest of the time, stations would be free to air current programming - plus all-news, all-sports and home shopping channels, all of them potential new money-makers.
Whatever happens, viewers will need new TV sets to see the improved broadcasts. And note: Even promoters say it'll take a big digital set, 35-inches or larger and costing about $1,500 more than current analog models, to see the difference in picture quality.
There's a cheaper alternative, but it's a no-gainer in terms of picture quality. Viewers can buy converters for about $200 and turn new, improved digital images back into analog signals that today's equipment can air.
Until recently, there was no marketplace challenge to TV broadcasters because no one else wanted their airwave space. That changed with the appearance of cellular phone, pager, cable TV, satellite TV and other telecommunications entrepreneurs who, since 1993, have had to buy airwave channels to make their fortunes.
And these competitors to broadcast TV understandably see red. ``After paying $8 billion (and climbing) for new spectrum, the wireless industry is watching in shock and dismay as the broadcasters seek ... free new spectrum with which to, among other things, compete against those who paid for their spectrum,'' sputtered Thomas Wheeler, president of the Washington-based Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association, in a recent letter to FCC Chairman Hundt.
``It's like writing a check to the economic powerhouses of the country. It's an outrageous grab,'' complained Janice Obuchowski, president of Freedom Technologies, a telecommunications consulting firm based in Washington.
TV viewers who will foot the digital transition's bill, of course, have a similar right to complain. But viewers have been largely blacked out when it comes to proposals about TV's future that reach about as deeply into America's living rooms as government ever gets.
One big reason is that network TV news shows have not reported that broadcasters could be asked to pay for spectrum they now get free, or that TV viewers might have to junk their sets in the name of progress.
``It's self-censorship'' reckons Edward Fouhy, a veteran senior news producer and executive who has worked at CBS, ABC and NBC. ``You're an assigning editor or a supervising producer. ... One story is going to make your company brass mad; the other story is perfectly legitimate but it's not going to offend your company. You make the easy choice.''
CBS correspondent Eric Engberg, who often reports on political influence-wielding, takes a milder view. He says stories about the TV industry often fall into the cracks between ``pitiful'' business reporting and media reporting that concentrates on sexier stories.
Consumer advocacy groups fighting what they view as a spectrum giveaway to broadcasters aren't doing much better, particularly with the new Republican Congress. ``Environmentalists do OK because people connect to trees and park land and beauty, particularly if you want to preserve them,'' explained Jeff Chester of the Center for Media Education in Washington, which advocates auctions.
``But public ownership of the electromagnetic spectrum isn't so easy to understand and relate to as public park land,'' Chester said. ``You can't see spectrum, for one thing, and we're not trying to preserve it; we're proposing to charge a fee for its use; and that puts spectrum auctions, for many people, into the murky realm of subsidies and taxes.''
Briefly last fall, several conservative groups close to House Speaker Newt Gingrich joined with consumerists and the wireless industry to press for auctions of airwave channels. To exempt TV station owners from auctions would perpetuate ``one of the greatest government giveaways in history,'' argued Karen Kerrigan, founder of the Campaign for Broadcast Competition and a corporate welfare foe in the conservative camp.
The campaign failed.
LENGTH: Long : 155 linesby CNB