Fruits of FCC’s DTV Efforts Include $23 Million in Contracts

Commission officials said they're nailing down additional contracts. They hope soon to release the rest of the “grassroots” efforts in the works to get consumers’ digital converter boxes hooked up, DTV questions answered and antennas properly installed, they said. More contracts may be announced Wednesday, 30 days before the 927 full-power stations still broadcasting in analog go all-digital. A panel of FCC officials will discuss the transition at the monthly commission meeting Wednesday, agency officials said. Industry officials aren’t expected to speak as they have at other monthly meetings this year. An FCC spokesman had no comment.

The commission’s request that all stations still on analog simulate a cutoff of that signal May 21 (CD May 7 p13) will bear fruit, with wide participation, but the FCC probably won’t get everything it asked for, said industry officials. Some broadcasters are unlikely to run analog soft cutoff tests three times that day for five minutes each, as the commission seeks, they said. “It’s an awful long time because viewers are saturated” with DTV information, said James Ocon, vice president of technology for Gray TV. “Thirty seconds is a long time in the TV world.” Eight of the company’s 36 stations are broadcasting in analog.

Whether stations simulate analog shutdowns for the full five minutes that the FCC seeks is partly a marketing question, said Ocon. For DTV education overall, “we're doing more than the minimum even on the few stations that are left” and “helping out the other broadcasters with what we've learned” from switching to digital early, he said. Each station must decide how long to run the tests, said David Donovan, president of the Association for Maximum Service TV. “As a general proposition, the greater flexibility you have, the greater the buy-in of the stations,” he said. “The readiness of markets varies.”

More stations probably will take part in soft cutoff than any previous one, and all broadcasters owned by networks including ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, Telemundo and Univision will participate, an NAB spokeswoman said. The length of the tests will “vary quite a bit, it’s going to be anywhere from two to five minutes,” she added. The tests will take place within 15 minutes of 7:30 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. May 21, she said.

Hundreds of DTV Help Centers

The biggest DTV education contract among those recently awarded by the FCC was one for $3.5 million to Burson-Marsteller for public relations and advertising help May 5 through at least July 12, our review found. (See separate report in this issue.) The second-largest FCC contract, for $2.8 million, is for Teletech to answer phone calls on the transition through at least June 30. Between Teletech and the FCC’s own operators, more than 4,000 people will be available to take DTV calls, said the NAB spokeswoman. The commission agreed to spend at least $6.5 million for six entities to run local transition information centers. It will spend another $10.4 million for 18 contractors to install 207,000 DTV converter boxes in homes.

Contractors will run 219 “mobile clinics” and an additional 76 “walk-in help centers” to demonstrate converter box installation, channel scanning and antenna adjustment, FCC records show. Among those that will offer the help are Pintech, to be paid $206,800. It received a $2.8 million grassroots contract under former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. Apollo Industries and Green Planet Construction, each getting more than $1 million, are among other help-center operators.

The FCC divided converter box installation contracts into two groups -- “expert” and “basic” -- and more such contracts are coming, a commission official said. Expert installation is for homes whose residents couldn’t install a box or who got visits from “basic” contractors that failed, said the FCC. Deployment Essentials, Hernandez Consulting, Installs Inc., KMAD Business Service and R&D Training & Technical Service will be expert contractors. Atlanta Fitness Repair, Deals Etc., Visionary Investments, nonprofit Self-Help for the Elderly and WOSU Public Media will offer basic help.

In other DTV action, the FCC approved the use of translators to serve areas not reached by the primary digital signals of stations whose analog signals they received. The order, released late Friday, had been expected (CD April 30 p4). The order dismissed opposition from Dell, Google and Microsoft to the plan. It won’t require stations seeking to run the translators to show that other technical solutions won’t work, as sought by those companies and the Community Broadcasters Association. “We do encourage stations to consider other, potentially more spectrally efficient solutions” such as increasing transmitter or power, the agency said. “It is not likely that replacement translators will have a substantial impact on other uses of this spectrum.”

Fourteen stations applied for 20 translators total, the FCC said. “Stations can use translators only within their service areas and only to replace service lost as a result” of the DTV switch, said a written statement Monday. “Signal loss has resulted in part from unavoidable engineering changes that stations were required to make.”