TV Broadcasters’ Spectrum Message Gels Around Mobile DTV

“This technology and the collaboration in the industry to make it happen shows that the spectrum is valuable the way it’s being used now,” said Mark Richer, president of the Advanced TV Systems Committee, the industry’s standards- setting body. Broadcasting has its place in the broadband world, as it is still among the most efficient ways to communicate with a large audience, he said: “I don’t think you could find a more effective way to serve the public than with the combination of our existing broadcast infrastructure and new technologies like mobile.” ATSC members were expected to approve the mobile DTV standard Thursday night.

The rhetoric around the wireless industry’s spectrum needs is overblown, said Brandon Burgess, CEO of Ion Media and chairman of the Open Mobile Video Coalition, the group of broadcasters pushing mobile DTV. “When the work is done people will figure out that there is no ’spectrum crisis,'” Burgess said (CD Oct 8 p1): “It’s rhetoric akin to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and is politically motivated.”

Spectrum ‘Envy’

Now that the FCC has auctioned off large swathes of frequencies for wireless and other non-broadcast uses, it’s a natural time “to look at spectrum issues anew,” said Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program. “As people look to places where they can find spectrum, there are three places: Places where it’s not used now” often at higher frequencies, military and broadcast uses, he said. “I think there is spectrum envy of both the broadcasters and the military.”

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn sees the dialogue about commercial and government spectrum as centered on increasing efficiency and knowing “exactly what’s out there,” she told us. “It needs to be a data-driven process. We need to have conversations about those two tracks in terms of looking at how things are being used and do whatever we can to ensure the greatest efficiencies are achieved.” She said she doesn’t have a position on how much spectrum should be devoted to various uses.

Federal officials and legislators are looking everywhere for more spectrum for commercial broadband. “Since almost everything is on the table, I think reclaiming more TV broadcast spectrum for wireless broadband is definitely on the table,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future program. Though it’s up for discussion, raiding broadcasters’ spectrum probably won’t happen soon, Calabrese said. It would face too much opposition from broadcasters, public interest groups and high tech companies seeking to protect nascent TV “white spaces” technology, he said. “We just went through an agonizing six- year process to make a DTV transition and open the TV white spaces for unlicensed devices,” he said. “That needs to proceed without paralyzing everything with a long period of uncertainty.”

The FCC’s goal of making more spectrum available for wireless broadband is good, but there doesn’t seem to be an economic justification for moving broadcasters off their spectrum to serve that goal, said analyst Joel Kelsey of Consumers Union. “There’s still a large proportion of households in the U.S. that rely on over-the-air TV,” he said. “We're a long way off from carte blanche saying broadcasters aren’t serving enough people. But the goal of high speed wireless Internet is a noble one if that can be done in a way that’s both economical and efficient for consumers.”

Still, sensing the political climate, broadcasters are getting their act together on mobile, said Kerry Oslund, vice president of digital media for Schurz Communications. “There’s no doubt, considering the saber rattling on the Hill, that mobile DTV moves up the list” of priorities for station operators. Broadcasters have been working for years on mobile DTV technology, but the recession stalled some business efforts, he said. “The recession took away some of the intense focus that many broadcasters had on the standard and creating business models around the standard,” he said. “We had to take care of business in the middle of the recession.” But now that the standard is adopted, broadcasters are ready to move forward operationally and with their message in Washington, he said: “I don’t think broadcasters have really got their message out in the kind of way that we are now able to because we have a standard.”

Business Prospects for Mobile

Business planning around mobile DTV is proceeding, Ion Media’s Burgess said. Broadcasters may offer a free mobile service but have the ability to include premium subscription offerings beyond that, he said. “My hope is that in the next four to eight weeks there will be an announcement on the business side” involving a group of broadcasters and programmers, he said. Having the standard in place will “will accelerate the discussion and motivation on the business side,” he said.

Radio and TV stations, and their owners, must “create a compelling business product” to fend off any efforts to use broadcast spectrum for other things, said Emmis Chief Technology Officer Paul Brenner. “And then they need to get behind it, and really come together as an industry and really provide a nationwide, standardized solution. That is what a Sirius XM does, that is what an AT&T does.” The radio industry formed the Broadcaster Traffic Consortium, managed by Emmis, to use spectrum for navigation and other uses.

That radio consortium is farther along than the TV industry’s mobile video initiative, said Brenner, whose company sold its TV stations over the past decade. “If you're just taking local news and repurposing it for mobile phones, that’s not a sufficiently unique use for that spectrum,” he added. “I think they have hopes of what that is. I just don’t think they have figured it out as a business proposition.”

Meanwhile, broadcasters’ multicasting businesses are growing, said President David Donovan of the Association for Maximum Service Television. “The market for over-the-air DTV, in many respects began June 12,” he said. “What you're seeing since then is a market that’s involving HDTV, you're seeing some expansions in multicasting and also mobile TV,” he said. Multicasting could bring in as much as $100 million over the next two years, Burgess said.