CE Begins Stressing Fallbacks if Tuner Petition Fails at FCC

With many predicting a rejection of the CE petition at the Commission’s open agenda meeting Thurs. (CED June 6 p2), CEA and CERC staked out fallback proposals in meetings with Martin. CEA Pres. Gary Shapiro led a delegation that included Best Buy Senior Vp Mike Vitelli. If the FCC rejects the petition, they urged Martin, the Commission should delay the 50% compliance date by 4 months to Nov. 1 and accelerate the 100% deadline by 4 months to March 2006. The fallback proposal “would allow market forces to work and would further serve the public interest,” they told the Commission.

Enforcement of the DTV tuner mandate got no mention in the FCC’s original Aug. 8, 2002, order. Now, even those backing the CE petition to modify compliance deadlines urge stepped-up enforcement as “much-needed,” in the words of one advocate who requested anonymity. That urgency emanates from reports cited by the Assn. of Public TV Stations (APTS) in comments on the CE industry petition. APTS said even sets with required ATSC tuners may lack ATSC decoders needed for full over-the-air reception capability. “If such practices are occurring, this would surely violate the spirit and intent of the regulation as passed,” APTS told the Commission in April. “If these reports are correct, the practice of omitting ATSC decoders should be prohibited through appropriate modifications to the Commission’s rules forthwith.” CEA said APTS’s concerns are unfounded, since they're based on erroneous reports.

However, under a proposal floated by Dell, CE makers would have to submit shipment reports to the FCC verifying 50% compliance at the July 1 deadline. But the reports wouldn’t be due until a year later, when 100% of 25-36” TVs must have built-in ATSC tuning. That timing is consistent with a CERC argument raised at the Commission last week -- that the only fair and reliable way to enforce the 50% mandate “would be indirectly, as a consequence of the onset of a 100% regime,” according to a CERC ex parte filing. However, to our knowledge, CERC has not backed any proposals such as those by Dell to have CE makers show compliance by providing the FCC with production and import data.

Meanwhile, Dell, according to a separate ex parte filing June 2, told the Commission it “could not simply remove analog TV tuners from its wide-screen flat-panel TV sets and sell them as monitors.” Dell said it was responding to questions from legal advisers to FCC Comr. Copps. Such questions seem based concerns at the FCC that CE makers easily could skirt compliance with the tuner mandate by shipping tunerless analog monitors. The rules say by July 1, an ATSC tuner must be included in 50% of the 25-36” units shipped of TV sets equipped with an NTSC tuner.

But Dell said it would not be easy to reconfigure its sets as monitors because the analog tuner “is physically part of the motherboard” and can’t be removed without replacing the entire motherboard. “Moreover, Dell does not have a replacement motherboard for this system that does not contain an analog tuner,” it told the Commission. It’s also not possible to take the motherboard from Dell’s 20” monitor and put it in Dell’s 26” or 30” TVs, the company said. “Even if these physical problems could be overcome and the tuners could be removed, it would take 60 to 90 days to recertify the television sets as monitors,” Dell said.