FCC Boosts DTV Efforts Amid Obama Team Interest
The FCC is boosting digital-TV outreach as the DTV transition nears and representatives of President-elect Barack Obama seem to have homed in on the switch as a significant area for the agency, commission and industry officials said. A top official at the Media Bureau is asking state broadcaster associations to agree to simulate analog signal cutoffs at the same time one month and two months before Feb. 17, they said. And FCC officials from all bureaus are working with TV stations to coordinate the switch, said an agency spokesman.
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The spokesman confirmed that the bureau “is reaching out to state broadcaster groups” to ask that they run so-called analog soft cutoffs for five minutes on Dec. 17 and Jan. 17. “The chairman does support it,” said the spokesman. “What we have encouraged or suggested is trying to do it around the same time in each time zone,” possibly at 7:30 p.m., he added. The commission is trying to “match people up” to work with broadcasters on DTV outreach in designated markets, he said. A broadcast lawyer said it appears that there’s an FCC employee responsible for the effort in all 210 TV markets. The spokesman was unsure if the FCC will reach all the cities. There are regional FCC coordinators for such efforts, most working at agency headquarters, said another agency official.
Commissioner Robert McDowell thinks “there’s a big public awareness benefit to a national soft test even if it’s just for a minute,” he said in an interview. “We would hopefully get a lot of national coverage on that. It should certainly be encouraged -- it’s certainly an idea in the right direction.” The first topic brought up by three members of the Obama FCC transition team during a Nov. 21 meeting with McDowell was DTV, he said. Chairman Kevin Martin said Wednesday that the DTV transition would be a challenge for the next FCC head (CD Dec 4 p3) and should be an area of focus. Spokespersons for the Obama transition team didn’t reply to messages seeking comment.
McDowell and Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein worry that the FCC’s DTV call center will be swamped with inquiries around the time of the transition, they said. “We need to increase our phone bank capacity to handle 2 million phone calls in the days immediately following February 17,” Adelstein told a conference last week. With about 135 agency employees and contractors taking calls, the FCC may need to spend $5 million to $6 million to expand the centers, he added. The commission spokesman declined to say how many people take calls. “We're going to get a lot of calls and we will work on having the call centers prepared,” he said. The regulator will spend “a significant amount” of the $20 million given to it by Congress for DTV education on the centers, he said.
“We have to be prepared for the worst-case scenario, which might be more than a couple million calls,” McDowell said. “As we get closer to Feb. 17 I think were going to get inundated with calls, so we need to make sure we have a sufficient amount of trunking capacity into the call center as well as attorney-professionals so there’s not a long wait time.” Both Adelstein and McDowell cited the experience of Wilmington, N.C., where the commission and broadcasters got several thousand calls after many stations there switched to digital Sept. 8. Executives at those stations forecast that several hundred thousand calls will be received by stations on Feb. 17 (CD Sept 10 p2).
The NAB is encouraging members to simulate analog cutoffs, a spokesman said. “A majority of stations are doing analog shut-off tests this month, either pre-planned or with the FCC initiative.” That also applies for January, he said. The CEA supports “these efforts of our industry partners to ensure no American loses TV signals because of a lack of information,” said a spokeswoman.