The Community Broadcasters Association reversal on analog-passthr...

passthrough available to consumers, CBA now completely reverses itself and argues against such boxes” in its U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia complaint (CD March 31 p11), the spokesman said. “CBA should be educating its viewers about the DTV transition and choosing the right converter box,” he said. “Instead, it uses constantly shifting and increasingly expensive legal tactics in a desperate effort to derail the DTV transition and transform it into perpetual analog preservation.” CBA claims to have been consistent in opposing analog-blocking DTV converter boxes the last 18 months and is stumped on why it never raised analog passthrough or dual-tuner converter boxes in oral or written testimony it gave at an Oct. 31 House Telecom Subcommittee hearing on the DTV transition, Peter Tannenwald, CBA outside counsel, told us in an e-mail. In the days before, the CBA was caught up in its annual convention in Las Vegas, he said. Its president, Ron Bruno, even had to leave the event early to testify, Tannenwald said. Only at the convention had CBA first “gotten wind” from CE makers about the availability of only a few coupon-eligible boxes with analog passthrough, he said. Perhaps CBA “had not really thought through the implications” when Bruno testified, said Tannenwald. Nor had CBA done “any of the legal research that led us to discover the applicability of the All Channel Receiver Act” -- the basis of its D.C. Circuit complaint that coupon-eligible boxes lacking analog tuners should be declared illegal, Tannenwald said.