TV Broadcasters Want More Details about Incentive Auctions, but FCC Says it Needs Legislation First

The FCC can’t address post-auction issues before it knows exactly what kind of authority it will receive from congress, Lake said. “We don’t think we can work out the details of the realignment before we have the statutory authority to go ahead,” Lake said. “Congress may tell us some things that may affect how we can go forward,” he said. “We can’t go forward until we know what they say.” He said the agency is seeking broad authority to hold incentives and believes they will prove to be among the agency’s most valuable tools in the future.

The agency has changed its message about why incentive auctions are needed, said John Hane a broadcast attorney with Pillsbury Winthrop. “Originally it was ‘a looming nationwide spectrum crisis,'” he said. “Now it’s ‘a potential shortage of spectrum in a few densely populated areas, some time in the next decade.’ It doesn’t have the same marketing spin,” he said. But the true debate isn’t over whether there’s a shortage of spectrum, but whether the wireless industry should have access to the TV band, which would be much less expensive to build robust wireless networks on, he said. “It’s a capital issue,” he said. “What we're talking about is taking the better spectrum and giving it to the mobile industry to reduce their deployment costs,” he said. A spectrum shortage in the largest domestic markets is a “national problem,” Lake said. “We think it’s a national problem if we hit a spectrum wall in our largest cities,” he said.

Mobile DTV could meet some of the consumer demand for video on mobile devices that is driving much of the growth in mobile broadband use, Lake said. “That’s one of the reasons I'm excited about mobile TV. It’s another way to get video to people on the move,” he said. “We see broadcasting as serving a very important role going forward and welcome the innovation we see,” Lake said.

There will be more consumer disruption associated with repacking the TV band after an incentive auction if consumers continue to ditch their pay-TV services for a combination of over-the-air and online video, Hane said. “You're probably going to have a world in which there are a lot more over-the-air-over-the-top combos and a lot more cord cutting,” he said. But while viewer disruption is a material issue, it may be worth the trouble if the end result is a world “that is materially better for broadcasting and broadband,” he said. But that would involve eliminating some of the ownership and technological regulations governing broadcasting, and the FCC doesn’t appear to be contemplating those types of changes, he said. “I think there is absolutely a win-win in incentive auctions, repacking, technical and ownership deregulation for broadcasting,” Hane said. “But either the FCC doesn’t understand that there’s an upside there or has chosen not to pay attention to that."

It’s a false choice to suggest that spectrum optimization and re-allocation shouldn’t occur in parallel, Mobile Future Chairman Jonathan Spalter said in a phone interview after the panel. “The notion that you have to have optimization on the one hand and re-allocation on the other doesn’t make any sense at all,” he said. If the industry is to reach President Barack Obama’s spectrum goals, “we have to be going down both tracks aggressively,” he said.

NAB Show Notebook

The Advanced TV Systems Committee has taken “a slow, conservative approach” to 3D TV, President Mark Richer said at NAB. “We haven’t jumped on the bandwagon like others have, for good or for bad,” he said. In the last year, “we have done a lot of work” on 3D TV, he said, though “we have more questions than we do answers,” as an ATSC planning team said in its recent report (CD March 24 p5). Richer’s “humble opinion” on 3D TV is that terrestrial broadcasters need “to focus on devices that move,” he said. For broadcasters to deliver 3D TV programming to “fixed” receivers in the home is “probably not the place to focus,” he said. Of beaming 3D TV signals to portable handheld DTV devices, Richer said he’s “not sure there’s a big rush to do that,” but for terrestrial broadcasters, that “makes the most sense.”

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Sky has seen “very, very rapid acceleration” in consumer acceptance of 3D TV in the U.K. in the year since launching its Sky 3D dedicated channel last April, said Chris Johns, chief engineer. Sky estimates there are now 140,000 3D TV screens in U.K. homes, well ahead of its forecast a year ago that there would be 100,000, he said. Of the 140,000, Sky 3D has 70,000 activations, he said. Sky 3D is on the air 15 hours a day and is available for free to “top-tier” subscribers on all 3.5 million Sky set-top boxes, he said. Sky 3D has shown more than 150 hours of sports programming since its commercial launch, including 100 live sports events, he said. The channel shows 2-3 live soccer or rugby matches a week, Johns said. Sky’s mantra is that it’s easy to do 3D, but very hard to do good 3D, he said. “If we start delivering cut-price 3D, people won’t buy into it,” he said. “It’s all about quality, not quantity. Give your customers a reason to wear their 3D glasses. 3D will not improve bad programming.” Sky’s mission is to avoid 2D-to-3D conversion at all costs and to avoid giving subscribers “theme park 3D,” but rather an “immersive” 3D viewing experience they can comfortably watch for hours, he said. “Create with care,” Johns said of 3D content conception. “A comfortable experience is a must."

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Digital Stream, licensee from Technicolor of the RCA brand name for small-screen TVs, is using the NAB Show to introduce a line of four “pocket TV hybrid” portables containing mobile DTV and standard DTV tuners. They'll be sold online on a new e-commerce website, www.rcaportabletv.com, that went live Monday. The line begins with a 3.5-inch model that lists for $119 and includes an LED-backlit screen, signal strength indicator, closed captioning and an easel-back stand. It runs on AC power or will work for four hours on four rechargeable AA batteries. A step-up widescreen model for $159 adds a brighter display, FM reception and four hours of power on a built-in lithium polymer battery. There’s also a 7-inch widescreen model, $179, with a high-resolution display and built-in lithium polymer battery. Rounding out the line is a $129 automobile tuner/receiver for car infotainment systems that’s smaller than a deck of cards and is powered through a car charger. The pocket TVs are “among the first handheld hybrid television receivers in the U.S. market, and the new mobile DTV functionality makes it possible for viewers to enjoy their favorite programs as well as local news, weather, and sports wherever they go,” said Chris Lee, Digital Stream’s vice president of sales and marketing. He said the company is “closely monitoring the rollout of mobile DTV market by market, and we are working with retailers that are interested in bringing these new options to viewers."