Broadcasters Volunteer Progress Reports on DTV Outreach
Broadcasters told a Wednesday a House Telecom Subcommittee hearing that $700 million worth of voluntary DTV education measures more than compensate for FCC mandates they call needless and even counterproductive to the DTV shift. But subcommittee Democrats who had pushed FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to circulate an order setting those mandates seemed unconvinced that broadcasters will police their own.
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Subcommittee Chairman Edward Markey, D-Mass., and House Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D-Mich., had written to Martin urging the mandates on broadcasters only to see NAB oppose them in a subsequent rulemaking. Markey asked Hearst-Argyle Television CEO David Barrett, testifying for NAB, how broadcasters plan to punish noncompliant stations without recourse to an FCC “club” that would “move those recalcitrant stations in the right direction.” Barrett said the way to go is “to enlist the voluntary support of this industry and we have demonstrably done that with commitments from all the networks and over a thousand stations.”
“The makings” of NAB’s volunteer program “will go beyond the notion of just doing a minimum threshold campaign mandated by the FCC,” he said. “This is an exercise that’s much more important than making Smokey the Bear an icon. This has to be a multi-market campaign. It has to be creatively executed in every local market in the country. I would observe that there’s such a large number of stations, groups, companies that have already committed, who are prepared to deliver a quarterly report to the FCC or to this committee and demonstrate the execution of this program.”
“NAB always sends in their best broadcasters to testify,” Markey said, adding that no one expects Hearst- Argyle to be a slacker. “We need the regulations for the bad guys.” Asked by Markey how Hearst-Argyle would feel about stations dodging their outreach duties, Barrett said “it’s a matter of self-interest” for all stations to take part. “But what if they do shirk it?” Markey asked. “If they shirk it, I think they're going to marginalize their own business prospects,” Barrett said. “And I believe, sir, that when you're talking about 98 billion advertising impressions that will be delivered by those that are participating, consumers will not be shortchanged on this.” Voluntary outreach will reach 93 percent of U.S. TV viewers, “and they're going to hear the messages that we broadcast some 400 times,” he said. “This is a staggering program.”
If Congress doesn’t level the playing field between full-power TV stations and the country’s 910 Class A low- power stations on cable carriage rights, “mandated local programming by many small, community-based broadcasters will cease to exist in the digital world,” said Ron Bruno, president of the Community Broadcasters Association. Broadcasting exclusively over the air with no cable or satellite content “no longer is a viable business model” for Class A stations, Bruno said. “As a result, Class A stations have attempted to make private arrangements with cable companies in an effort to obtain carriage,” he said. But cable’s demands “have been too onerous, and Class A stations across America are dying,” Bruno said.
Under a CBA proposal that’s “simple and fair,” Class A stations immediately would cease analog broadcasts and convert to single-channel, digital-only operations, Bruno said. This would speed the transition, freeing valuable analog spectrum, he said. In return, the stations would be granted carriage rights within their Grade B contours on the local digital cable system’s basic tier, he said. The proposal doesn’t seek carriage rights throughout a station’s designated market area, he said. “We're not trying to be superstations,” he said.
Asked by subcommittee vice chairman Mike Doyle, D-Pa., why cable won’t accommodate community broadcasters’ carriage needs without a government mandate, Insight Communications CEO Michael Willner, testifying on NCTA’s behalf, said “there’s a misconception that a 750 MHz cable system is this vast wasteland of bandwidth,” available for unlimited use. The reality is most are “struggling today to try to maneuver the services that we're already offering to provide competitive services in digital video, high-speed data, Internet service and telephone service,” Willner said. “To open up a must-carry requirement for another 1,000 TV stations across this country would just put tremendous amounts of pressure on the limited bandwidth we have available.”