Applaud FCC Ruling?
Dear Gary: Reading all of the articles and comments about the FCC’s recent ruling requiring digital tuners to be incorporated in all TVs by 2007, I think those who are against the idea are missing a few important points. I’m old enough (as I know you are) to remember when, as of April 1, 1964, all TV sets manufactured or sold in the United States required UHF tuning capability. Did the world come crashing down? No! The only thing that resulted from that policy was the success and proliferation of UHF TV stations. People could now tune in and watch. If a station failed, it wasn’t because no one could see it. Do you see a parallel? The fact that the FCC is now mandating all TV stations to convert to digital would be all for naught if there were no sets out there to receive these signals. After all, if the intent was to deliver programming strictly on satellite and cable, then why make these stations spend millions of dollars each to totally retrofit their plants? Have you priced a tower and transmitter lately? What about all those sets, like the one in my kitchen, which will not be hooked up on cable or satellite? If that isn’t a good case for DTV tuners to be in all sets, what is? How about those who, for whatever reason they have, choose not to subscribe to cable or satellite? Over-the-air TV reception is free. Many people opt not to pay for signals they can get for free. Without the digital tuner in their new sets, they’ll be left out or forced to pay for something they really don’t want. By the time DTV tuners will be mandatory in all sets, the added cost will be much lower than what the doomsayers predict. I applaud the FCC’s gutsy decision, and support it 100 percent.
Jay L. Rudko, Pembroke Pines, Florida
HDTV Contributing Editor Dale Cripps (who is also Publisher of HDTV Magazine and President of the High-Definition Television Association of America) Comments:
If ever there were two sides to a coin it is on this issue. One can easily jump on the side of the argument made by Jay L. Rudko for exactly the reason and logic he uses. The other side relates more to the supporting of HDTV. As a long-time advocate for HDTV I watch for every warning sign—anything appearing in the business that can do damage to it. The most worrisome things are the Trojan horses—things appearing first to be one thing but in time becoming quite another. When I first heard about the FCC decision for mandating ATSC tuners into eventually all TVs my first thought was, “O.K., this is being done in order to hasten the transition which is perceived by the FCC and the broadcasters to be slowed down due to high prices.” With the FCC’s ATSC tuner mandate comes a level playing field in terms of the decoder. The only remaining market differentials will be from competitive pricing, attacking, then, the culprit of “high price” effectively. As soon as you have to force something into the hands of the consumer by government decree you have no alternative but to be politically correct in doing it or suffer painful political fallout—lost votes. TV is very important to both the electorate and the election process. Despite claims from the computer people, television is the most cherished appliance in the home. To be politically correct in this case, the government cannot force anything, but the least costly mandate. There is not one consumer advocacy group in this nation that would sit still for a government decree making everyone buy HDTV displays along with those built-in tuners. That is especially true considering that there is not one American-owned producer of television sets to be found. It becomes barely passable to mandate digital tuners in the lowest costing of the appliances. Manufacturers will have no choice but to engage their low-cost machinery and to me this signals a very rapid dilution of HDTV’s present strength. We all know that as price goes down in consumer electronics the market base for that product category expands. Look at it as a pyramid growing from the top down. The lower the price goes, the broader is the area covered by the base of that pyramid. A digital television signal provider today has only one market-driven choice, and that is to transmit HDTV signals. That is the expectation of the people who have already purchased HDTV receivers and monitors—the mainstay of the digital television revolution so far. Very few “digital-ready” monitors, despite how marginal they may be in performance, are not rated as HDTV (1080i or 720p). But in ten years one might look at the results of the mandated business and see that because lower prices have led the rush to a cheap installed base of receivers, there is now 80 percent of the tuner-equipped monitors capable of displaying no more than 480i (the lowest costing monitors) and 20 percent left capable of HDTV. This is not the result of a free market condition, but is due to the forcing by government and the corresponding demotivation to apply good marketing money and skills to selling the more costly HDTV. It takes five times the bandwidth to send one HDTV program as compared to one program in 480i SDTV. Granted, both would come in the same 19.3 Mbps ATSC signal, but if you are not using all 19.3 Mbps for the HDTV format, you can assign those leftover bits to many other commercial purposes, including more programs in SDTV 480i. A 480i will still play on an HDTV monitor and so with one-fifth the information needed for HDTV a signal provider can still reach 100 percent of their digitally installed audience. Why use 100 percent of your spectrum for a relatively few HDTV enthusiasts when you could be selling liberated bits profitably to other markets? A broadcaster may risk losing those relatively few HDTV viewers (who insists upon viewing only HDTV formats), but then they have four times more opportunity to make it up. Remember, most of a station’s revenue comes from local news, and to outfit for that in HDTV is rare, and many would argue the least valuable thing to do with resources. So, as a practical purpose, 480p may be the top desired format from a local TV station. The networks may wish to look good with the best format in the marketplace but they cannot police the affiliates, who can filter down the network supplied HDTV signal to 480i, if they like. My concern is that should a large enough installed base aggregate which can only display up to 480p, pressure to abandon bandwidth-hungry HDTV for the higher-margin multiplex business would be irresistible. As an advocate for HDTV I think mandating tuners removes the key responsibility from the industry leaders to sell the HDTV format to the American public, or, for that matter, even sell the idea of digital television. You don’t have to sell anything when the government forces it upon you. With this particular tuner mandate you chiefly satisfy the broadcasters’ belief that mandated tuners will create the 85 percent installed base benchmark —thus permitting the retirement of the analog channel sooner. Shutting down that analog transmitter quickly is the goal of broadcasters. That shutdown will save them $12,000 a month on average for each of 1,600 transmission centers. My theory is that by hastening the transition through force, a large installed base of lower-performing displays will result and diminish the importance and focus upon HDTV. There will always be a price penalty for the HDTV displays over the SDTV displays. The alternative to forcing something is doing the harder job of selling HDTV to the American public. While we worry that the transition is not going fast enough, the truth is, as revealed in a recent Government Accounting Office report to Congress, that fully 40 percent of the American public have never heard of the DTV transition and another 40 percent are so confused by the mix of marketing terms being tossed around for the same things that they have lost interest. Only five percent are clear enough on the subject to say they will be buyers in the near future. I think that before we go mandating anything, we ought to chastise the leaders of all segments of the television industry to get out there collectively and do a “Class A” job of selling this transition to the American public—principally using HDTV as the key attraction or killer application. That is the chief reason we are in this transition in the first place—broadcasters’ fear of being passed by. I am fully confident that the American people will respond to a clear, concise, and inviting message, and as a result the transition will pick up a momentum that will challenge the manufacturers to keep pace in serving demand for years to come. Price is NOT the chief barrier in the transition today—confusion is. The very institutions which should be clarifying everything via concise symbolic expressions are themselves the authors of that confusion. Why? Not all of their members are equally for HDTV. Some prefer 480p. Some would just as well stick with 480i. Then there are those more courageous who want to market 720p or 1080i. To satisfy them all these institutions came up with a catchall phrase—DTV—which could mean skim milk or ice-cream—and the general public has thrown up their hands trying to figure out which it is. The institutions, which should provide the authority one needs to end confusion instead of perpetuating it every time they open their mouths, shoot themselves in the foot, if not something more vital, with every divisive word they write. Since the market is not being driven by dissatisfaction of the old standard, except in the videophile groups, the confusion being spread is enough to keep all but the most stalwart out of the marketplace. Again, the American public have not yet been sold on the advantages of the only application of digital television that has any immediate appeal—HDTV—and some in the industry, mostly signal providers, are paying a heavy price for that missing element. Thus, a mandate to include tuners involuntarily and irrespective of prevailing market forces is not on my side of the coin. Editor-In-Chief Gary Reber Comments: The FCC mandate requiring digital tuners in all TV sets by 2007 is coming under fire in the House of Representatives. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) is introducing legislation to eliminte what he calls the “FCC TV tax.” According to Sensenbrenner, the digital tuner mandate would only directly impact the 13 percent of viewers who rely on over-the-air reception and result in increased costs for all consumers (current estimates of $250 per set). “To put it another way, the result of the FCC’s mandate is comparable to requiring viewers to purchase an expernsive antenna when they already have cable,” stated Sensenbrenner. Editor-In-Chief Gary Reber Comments: The FCC mandate requiring digital tuners in all TV sets by 2007 is coming under fire in the House of Representatives. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) is introducing legislation to eliminte what he calls the “FCC TV tax.” According to Sensenbrenner, the digital tuner mandate would only directly impact the 13 percent of viewers who rely on over-the-air reception and result in increased costs for all consumers (current estimates of $250 per set). “To put it another way, the result of the FCC’s mandate is comparable to requiring viewers to purchase an expernsive antenna when they already have cable,” stated Sensenbrenner. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), which also strongly opposes the digital TV tuner deadline, recently asked a federal appeals court to strike down the FCC decision. “The vast majority of consumers do not need and will not use these devices in order to receive digital television programming,” the CEA stated to the court.
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