New Company Wants to Help LPTV Offer Broadband
A new company aimed at helping low-power TV stations switch to DTV in exchange for using some of their spectrum to offer advanced wireless services showed its plans to broadband officials at the FCC last week, an ex parte filing shows. The CTB Group has a technology that will let LPTV stations offer ATSC broadcast and broadband simultaneously on the same channel, President Vern Fotheringham told Blair Levin, coordinator of the FCC’s broadband plan, and John Leibovitz, Wireless Bureau deputy chief. The company said it’s trying to recruit LPTV operators as affiliates and has received letters of intent from about 200 stations.
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For the plan to succeed, low power TV stations need permission from the FCC to build distributed transmission systems, said Greg Herman, the president of WatchTV, an LPTV operator. He said he’s been helping CTB and tested the technology at his station in Portland, Ore. The FCC’s DTS rules, adopted ahead of the DTV transition, cover only full- power stations. “What we have to have is formalization of DTS rules for low-power and Class A stations,” Herman said. DTS for LPTV will achieve two goals, he said: It boosts the coverage area of licensees without having to increase power, and more efficiently uses the spectrum at each of the multiple towers. “That enables really fascinating uses of the bandwidth,” including IP-based and targeted service.
LPTV advocates may seek even more bandwidth flexibility. CTB wants FCC permission for a group of LPTV stations in a market to pool their resources so one channel carries all the stations’ programming on multicast streams, leaving the remaining spectrum available for advanced services, the ex parte shows. Educational broadband service rules provide a precedent, the ex parte said. “Our stations should be able to use any modulation scheme that is allowable for 700 MHz auction winners,” Herman said.
Meanwhile CBT is trying to enlist low-power operators to sign on to its plan, said Amy Brown, the company’s director of industry relations. She used to be the executive director of the Community Broadcasters Association, now defunct. (See separate report in this issue.) “We're looking at just over 200 stations that have signed up since April,” Brown said. CTB wants three to five affiliates in each market, though more wouldn’t hurt, she said. The pitch to station owners is a strong one, because they can maintain their traditional broadcast businesses while offering new services, Brown said. “They can still be a broadcaster without giving away the entire farm and that’s what they want to do,” she said. “They wouldn’t still be in this business if they didn’t want to be broadcasters.”
CBT has tested its system at Herman’s station in Portland, with two cells, and it plans further tests in Washington, Herman said. “In my nearly two decades of involvement in this industry, this is the single most promising opportunity for low-power TV I have ever seen,” he said. Other operators would be well advised to sign on quickly, said Ron Bruno, president of Bruno Goodworth Network and a former CBA president. “If you're a low-power operator and you don’t, you might want to rethink what you're doing, because it definitely benefits you at this point.”