FCC and NTIA DTV-related funding requests appear in a draft continuing resolution Congress will take up later this week, according to a copy of the bill. NTIA Acting Administrator Meredith Baker plugged the $7 million the agency has told Congress it may need to mail recycled converter box coupons, she told a Monday Association for Maximum Service TV conference. NTIA has been in constant contact with House and Senate leaders on the NTIA’s funding proposal, Baker said.
Concern that tropical storm Hanna would hit Wilmington, N.C., during its early analog TV cutoff Monday raised sales of Winegard’s back-up battery pack for its coupon-eligible converter boxes. The $15 RC-BP9V, which uses six D cells to power Winegard’s RCDT09 and RCDT09A boxes, was promoted extensively in the area as the DTV switch neared. “It’s going pretty well,” Grant Whipple, Winegard national sales manager for digital reception products, told us Monday. “The pack will be available throughout the U.S. through dealers and our website, although we won’t be promoting it as heavily as we did in Wilmington.” Winegard’s battery pack can run its converter boxes up to 18 hours and connects to the set- tops’ 9-volt DV input. The ATSC “Mobile/Handheld” standard should be completed early next year, enabling smartphones and similar devices getting over-air DTV broadcasts to hit the market in Q3 of 2009.
Harris said it successfully tested mobile DTV equipment in Mexico City using LG prototype handheld receivers and programming from Grupo Televisa. “The feedback we received from Televisa was that these results were better than they originally anticipated, as their engineers were able to easily modify its existing … [ATSC] transmitter for mobile DTV, and provide solid reception throughout its broadcast contour -- even in challenging terrain,” said Nahuel Villegas, vice president of Harris Broadcast Communications for the Carribean and Latin American region. Televisa has no immediate plans to introduce a mobile DTV service.
Broadcasters’ efforts to put more of their receivers in mobile devices like cellphones, PDAs and laptops continue, now that the FCC has issued rules on the Commercial Mobile Alert Service this month. Broadcasters lobbied FCC commissioners on the public-safety benefits of putting FM receivers in mobile phones (CD June 20 p7). Those efforts weren’t acknowledged overtly in a July 8 FCC order on the CMAS rules, but broadcasters believe carriers can use the FM system for alerts within the framework laid out by the FCC, Emmis CEO Jeffrey Smulyan said in an interview. “My understanding is that our solution fits within the rules,” he said. Meanwhile, TV broadcasters’ efforts to develop a mobile DTV system are leading them to discussions with mobile carriers as well.
Broadcasters in Latin America agreed to buy mobile DTV equipment from Harris, the company said. Albavision will use the system in its Repretel operations in Costa Rica and at Radio Television Guatemala. Albavision already uses Harris DTV transmission equipment. Harris expects to have mobile DTV equipment available by November. It will be based on the ATSC Mobile/Handheld standard, which is still under development. Albavision said it plans to introduce the system in more Latin American countries later. The agreement follows last month’s announcement that competing proposals for the standard from Harris and LG and Samsung and Rohde & Schwarz would combine.
Direct broadcast satellite system operators should be able to continue to use their own channel placement, program guide, closed captioning and parental control data, instead of passing through Program and Systems Information Protocol data, Dish Networks told the Media Bureau last week. PSIP data is the ATSC standard. “PSIP data remains inaccurate or not as robust in providing program guide data,” said Linda Kinney, Dish vice president of law and regulation. On the issue of downconversion, broadcasters can choose on a channel-by-channel basis “not a program-by-program basis” to have Dish downconvert by either letterbox or center cut, Kinney told the staff, according to an ex parte filing.
U.S. broadcasters using certain Rohde & Schwarz equipment can support the forthcoming ATSC Mobile Handheld standard without new gear, the company said. Rohde customers’ “DTV transmitters using the R&S SX800 exciter are ready to be switched to ATSC M/H without hardware changes,” Program Manager Dave Benco said.
Blame “poor planning” at NTIA for dooming an effort by low-power TV, begun and ended last week, to promote Microprose analog-passthrough converter boxes to consumers whose coupons are about to expire, the Community Broadcasters Association said in response to a reader query on its KeepUsOn.com Web site. But according to our reality check of developments in the Microprose-CBA story, CBA misjudgments figured as much as any other factor in the Microprose “debacle,” as a CBA vice president called it Thursday when his group cut all ties to Microprose and its Web store.
Getting analog-passthrough DTV converters to consumers whose coupons are about to expire is the goal of a tie-in low-power TV’s Community Broadcasters Association debuted Tuesday with box supplier Microprose. But Microprose was delisted as a certified supplier, apparently because it’s against NTIA rules to redeem coupons for pre-orders, as Microprose was doing, an agency spokesman said.
A report by a broadcasters’ coalition recommending the most viable mobile DTV transmission system among three being reviewed will factor heavily into Advanced TV Systems Committee deliberations on setting a U.S. standard for mobile and handheld DTV broadcasting, ATSC President Mark Richer said in an interview Thursday. “The report makes some significant findings and recommendations that if they're confirmed by our specialist group will have a significant impact on our work on decision making,” he said, declining to discuss details. The report, delivered May 15 to ATSC, is said to have named LG and Harris’ Mobile Pedestrian Handheld system the best, prompting Samsung to offer elements of A- VSB, a competing system it devised with Rohde and Schwarz, to LG (CD May 15 p2) or (CED May 15 p1).