[ EEPI-Discuss ] Re: The Digital TV Fiasco

[Dan Krimm <djkrimbo@earthlink.net>]

>Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 12:14:33 -0700
>From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
>Subject: [ EEPI-Discuss ]  The Digital TV Fiasco
>To: eepi-discuss@eepi.org
...
>A really remarkable aspect of the FCC's continuing push to obsolete
>existing consumer televisions is how oblivious most people are
>to the entire process, particularly those persons who still depend
>on broadcast signals for all of their television viewing.


No argument from me that this has been badly handled, but IMHO it's mostly
because a hard date was not really set (the 85% fudge factor allowed
indefinite extension of the switchover).

If you really want to incentivize a switchover to digital, you have to have
a hard date that is not extendable, otherwise there is no market incentive
to drive demand, which is a pre-requisite to completing any such switchover.

I support the idea of a hard date for analog cutoff, but I think it needs
to *follow* the date by when TV manufacturers are mandated to include
digital tuners, and it must also mandate user-end D-A conversion (not
head-end conversion) in the MVPD market, to help drive the demand.  So,
earlier mandate of digital tuners and later mandate of analog cutoff give
more time for digital-capable sets to penetrate the market.

And then, there are proposals for means-tested D-A converters to be made
available to remaining analog-only TV households, which I also support (if
the estimates can be believed, auctioning off the old analog spectrum
should provide far more than required for such subsidization).

There's no pretty or clean way to make this migration happen -- it's a
chicken-egg proposition all around, so the market simply won't handle it on
its own.  It needs some smart management from the public sector, but that
doesn't mean that a perfect solution is possible.  There's going to be
grumbling all around, and nothing anyone does can really avoid it.  Just
try to balance it.

I think when the hard date is set, it then allows TV retailers to
explicitly sticker the analog product with a go-dark date, which helps
differentiate product value (which cannot be done presently without the
hard date), and it becomes public very quickly.  With the 85% loophole,
nobody was going to talk about it until things got closer to reality, and
the current status of the market is nowhere near plausible for switchover
yet, so it simply wasn't news, or pertinent to anyone's purchasing
decisions.

Hard date = big news = public debate, and it looks like Telecom Rewrite has
been pushed off in favor of DTV migration for this year.  You can bet that
Consumers Union and other consumer groups will be all over this once it
gets to a point of being fairly well-defined (until then it's just
speculation about speculation).

Details have a way of attracting attention in a way that vague
possibilities do not.  Should be an interesting debate, and it'll get
tangible well before the sets go dark (current proposals seem to be
somewhere around beginning of 2008 -- that's a good amount of time to get
it in front of the public eye).

Dan
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