Satellite Providers May Get to 2013 to Carry HD Signals
Satellite-TV providers are poised to win a delay to a proposed FCC deadline (CD Feb 28 p2) that they carry all TV stations in high definition in every market they serve, commission and industry officials said. Chairman Kevin Martin is expected to circulate soon a revised order giving DirecTV and Dish years beyond 2009 to meet the carry-one, carry-all mandate, commission officials said. They said Media Bureau officials are redoing an order that Martin circulated Feb. 6 that would have set a Feb. 17, 2009, deadline. The chairman wants his colleagues to vote on a new order Wednesday at the monthly FCC meeting.
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The revised order is expected to give direct broadcast satellite companies until 2013 to carry all HD signals in markets where subscribers get station signals by satellite, commission officials said. The order probably will stipulate that DirecTV and Dish start providing some markets HD soon after the 2009 analog cutoff, they said. Under the order, the companies gradually would have to serve more cities with HD signals until, by the new deadline, all are receiving them, they said. This tracks with a DBS proposal. It’s not clear if Martin will back giving the companies all the time they want.
The Media and International bureaus have supported the 2013 deadline, FCC officials said. Some commissioners have asked Martin to move the deadline to 2013, and none has asked for an earlier deadline, they said. But commissioners have forsworn proposing changes to Martin’s order as initially proposed before seeing the version now being drafted by the Media Bureau, they said. An FCC official said he couldn’t comment right away.
Martin may support giving the DBS providers a delay more brief than the four years they sought, an industry lawyer said. The NAB wants carry-one, carry-all required in all 210 U.S. markets well before 2013 (CD March 10 p8). The deadline should be “sooner rather than later,” an association spokesman said.
DBS companies can’t comply any faster than the schedule they propose, they said. The DBS industry proposal “assumes much more aggressive investment by DBS providers and more significant advances in technology than have occurred in the nine years since the first local markets” were offered service, Dish said last week in an ex parte. “The 2013 date is the one date that can’t change,” an industry source said.
Dish carries 1,460 local broadcast stations in standard definition and 129 in HD, it told the FCC last week. “If we had spare satellite capacity, we would provide HD in more markets,” it said. Using MPEG-4 set-top boxes, Dish can carry four HD stations per transponder, the company said: “Given anomalies in geography and limitations associated with frequency reuse, approximately 100 transponders can be loaded on the newest spot beam.”
NAB, which hasn’t proposed a deadline, wants the FCC to examine DirecTV and Dish claims that capacity limits keep them from serving all markets with HD before 2013. “We respect that claim but want the FCC as an expert agency to study the validity” of it, the NAB spokesman said.
The National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative took satellite-TV’s side, pointing out last week that many of its members have marketing agreements with Dish or DirecTV. An expansion of today’s carry-one, carry-all rules “could result in those carriers delaying the rollout of additional local signals or dropping HD service in existing markets and/or delaying service in future markets,” the NRTC said. That would devastate NRTC customers relying on satellite to get broadcast programming and those who expect to get local standard definition digital and HD in the near future, it said.
Dish said most of what NAB wants the FCC to require that it and DirecTV reveal is publicly available. “The majority, if not all, of this information can be found in prior filings in this proceeding, on Dish Network’s website, in Dish Network’s most recent 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FCC’s International Bureau’s IBFS database, and other industry and public sources,” Dish said in its response to NAB’s filing.
The satellites the DBS carriers use were designed for the current carry-one, carry-all obligation. Until new rules take effect, Dish and DirecTV can’t design satellites, Dish said.
The DBS carriers face technical problems serving all local TV markets, especially on the East Coast, Dish said. “The disproportionate clustering of broadcasters in large markets, particularly in the northeast, further constrains the ability of DBS providers to maximize the full capability of spot beam transponders and frequencies,” it said. “Even the most modern spot-beam satellites -- with over 10:1 frequency re-use -- cannot provide sufficient coverage to the population centers on the East Coast to analog markets today, let alone HD carry-one, carry-all.”