DTV Item on Education, Analog Cuts in Works at FCC
A wide-ranging DTV transition order and rulemaking notice in the works at the FCC is designed to implement part of the DTV Delay Act and seek comment on how to deal with much of the rest of it, said agency and industry officials. The Media Bureau and commissioners offices are working on the item, which may be released as soon as this week, they said. It will begin the process of clarifying how the nation’s 1,758 full-power stations must educate viewers about the new June 12 nationwide analog cutoff deadline, they said.
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The item will help detail how stations can stop such broadcasts before June 12 and how they can restart the process of ceasing such service after 421 did so Tuesday, said commission and industry officials familiar with the item. Earlier this month, Acting Chairman Michael Copps said the regulator likely would issue a rulemaking notice on consumer education responsibilities of stations staying on the air in analog until June (CD Feb 12 p3). An FCC spokesman declined to comment on the pending item.
“We are working on that today, trying to figure out exactly what the interim switch is,” Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said during an interview on last weekend’s edition of C-SPAN’s The Communicators. “We think most stations will probably go at the end. They're either going to go on June 12 or they already went on Feb. 17. There will be some that go in the middle. Congress envisioned that. The delay act envisioned that we would give flexibility to broadcasters to do that.” Adelstein said the FCC wants to make certain that broadcasters that switch during the interim give customers adequate notice and that there is a nightlight service for viewers to get basic news and local information in those markets.
The order is likely to require stations to continue to tell viewers about DTV until the June switch and possibly beyond, said industry and agency officials. Many stations interpreted the commission’s earlier consumer education order, setting a minimum number of public service announcements and screen crawls to be run in the first quarter, as requiring them to convey such information through March, said industry attorney David Oxenford. The pending item may seek comment on what education requirements to impose, said an FCC official.
Time for public feedback likely will be short, perhaps only days, because comments must be collected and an order approved by March 13, when the Act requires the FCC to fully implement the legislation, said agency and industry officials. The order portion of the item likely will say how much notice stations stopping analog transmissions between early March and June 12 must give to the FCC, they said. “There are stations that plan to transition at some date between now and June and I know that some of them for instance have technical reasons for doing so,” said Oxenford. “It would seem like the commission should give that technical flexibility.”
Meanwhile, no shortages of digital converter boxes were reported by stations or broadcast executives late last week, after some said certain stores had no or low inventory in markets where many stations stopped analog service last week. The CEA said there’s plenty of inventory. (See separate report in this issue.) Less than 2 percent of queries to the FCC’s DTV call center Feb. 13-18 said stores were out of boxes, the commission said late Thursday. “In some isolated cases, stations have reported spot shortages at individual stores” of the boxes, said an NAB spokesman. “But we have heard of no reports of any kind of systematic shortage.” Many Best Buy and RadioShack stores visited by James Ocon, Gray TV vice president of technology, had ample supplies, he said. “I don’t think there’s any problem now.”