The courts or the International Trade Commission or the Patent and Trademark Office, not the FCC, are the proper venues for challenging DTV patents if one deems they're not being licensed on reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) terms, DTV licensors’ heavy hitters told the FCC in written comments Monday. All, including ATSC, Funai, LG, MPEG LA, Philips, Qualcomm, Thomson and Zenith, urged the commission to deny a Vizio-Westinghouse Digital petition that the FCC initiate a rulemaking to regulate the patent fees and impose fines on licensors that don’t comply.
LAS VEGAS -- A backlog of perhaps several hundred TV license renewals persists at the FCC (CD Feb 8 p3/07) because the stations are the subjects of old indecency complaints and the commission is awaiting rulings on several court cases, industry lawyers said Monday. Speakers on an NAB panel complained that some licenses have been held up for years. They said the FCC has asked licensees that needed renewals to sell stations to agree to let the FCC take enforcement action for an indefinite time in exchange for clearance. Under acting Chairman Michael Copps, the period is down to two years, they said.
LG Electronics said it will begin mass-producing mobile DTV receiver chips in June. The development will set “the stage for widespread availability to the industry for a range of new consumer electronics products,” LG said Friday. Its LG2160A chip has an automatic power-saving mode to extend battery life for viewing DTV on the go, the company said. It handles all the ATSC mobile DTV standard’s demodulating and equalization functions and outputs IP streams to enable AV decoding in compatible receivers, LG said.
Sarnoff Corp. said it will introduce new tools for testing and validating compliance with the ATSC Mobile DTV candidate standard at the NAB show next week.
Mobile video usage and sales are still growing and projected to continue growing despite the downturn in the economy -- though some forecasts for the nascent industry have been toned down, analysts and industry executives told us. Usage and awareness of mobile video services continues to grow, but spending on the services may not grow as quickly in 2009 as the industry expected last year, said Lewis Ward, IDC Research manager for mobile, media and entertainment. IDC cut by 10 percent its mobile entertainment sales growth forecasts for 2009 after the economy tanked, he said. “It is impacting the market,” he said.
The Advanced TV Systems Committee recommended ways for cable systems and other pay-TV companies to use direct reception to carry DTV programming that’s ultimately delivered to analog subscribers, the ATSC said. The effort was an “example of inter-industry cooperation to help ensure that the digital television transition is as smooth as possible for all consumers,” said Glenn Reitmeier, ATSC’s chairman.
Members of the Senate Commerce Committee are said to be drafting a bill to delay the nationwide switch to digital TV from Feb. 17, according to lobbyists tracking the transition. Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., is thought to be involved in the work, they said.
LAS VEGAS -- No specific date was provided for the U.S. launch of mobile DTV by members of the Open Mobile Video Coalition at a news conference at CES Thursday. The group said only that the launch will come in 2009. But it did announce other plans for the initial broadcaster rollout. Participating companies demonstrated mobile DTV for the first time at the show using the candidate standard recently chosen by the group after the ATSC Mobile DTV standard setting process.
Americans are overpaying for DTV sets because of exorbitant royalties levied by patent holders that license the technology on unreasonable and discriminatory terms, a group that includes TV makers Vizio and Westinghouse Digital claimed Friday. In a petition due to be filed with the FCC Friday, the group was to ask the commission to initiate a rulemaking to regulate the patent fees, and to impose fines on licensors judged to be non-compliant.
DTV preparedness continues to improve, but “the pace at which U.S. households are getting ready has slowed down slightly” in the last month, Nielsen said. It estimates that 6.8 percent of U.S. TV homes are completely unprepared for the switchover - no TV sets are connected to a pay-TV service, a DTV converter box or have a built-in ATSC tuner. And 10 percent of homes aren’t completely ready, Nielsen said. The numbers are down from 7.4 percent and 10.3 percent last month.